Martin Journal of Peace Research
No. 1 (1996)
Rethinking the Failure of Agrarian Reform in Brazil:
Social Pacts and Political Elites, 1985-1988*
BY
Dr. Daniel Zirker*
Department of Political Science
University of Idaho
(An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the XVIII International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, March 10, 1994, Atlanta, Georgia.)
*The author would like to thank the University of Idaho Research Council and the Martin Institute for Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution for travel grants that facilitated field research in Brazil.
In the eleven years since the Brazilian military dictatorship finally yielded the presidency to a civilian, the country has seldom had an opportunity to celebrate its "democracy," or the wider distribution of power and resources implied by that term. Brazil is not alone in this regard. As Guillermo O'Donnell recently observed, many of the new democracies in Latin America can be characterized as "delegative democracies," plebiscitary polities that emphasize presidential personalismo, weak institutions and a cycle of political crisis (O'Donnell, 1994). Brazil's special circumstances, moreover, have included constitutional changes that have given the Congress "broad powers without responsibility for governing, while leaving the president with powers insufficient for his nearly complete responsibility for conducting the nation's governance" (Schneider, 1991:384). The resultant power vacuum has tended to be filled by agreements between elite pactos políticos, or political pacts.1 In the contemporary climate of protracted socio-economic crisis, this configuration has tended to favor obstructionism, rather than dynamic policy implementation.
It is in this context that a rethinking of the abortive implementation, between 1985 and 1988, of a comprehensive plan for Brazilian agrarian reform seems to be most appropriate. The quixotic rise and decline of this centerpiece of the "New Republic" provides direct evidence, in the form of a "crucial case," of the persistence and continuing power of political pacts in the post-1985 civilian era in Brazil. The strangeness of the case adds to its fascination: why did President José Sarney, a major landowner, embrace a comprehensive plan for agrarian reform in the first place? Given the recent past history of authoritarianism and presidential prerogatives, why was he then so powerless (or reluctant) to implement it?2 A rethinking of this failure of agrarian reform thus suggests possible insights into topics of great currency: the character of Brazilian democracy; the governability (or, rather, non-governability) of contemporary Brazil; and, finally, why it is, as E. Bradford Burns puts it, that "poor people inhabit rich lands" (Burns, 1986:352).
The military dictatorship restrained all forms of social mobilization during its twenty-one year tenure, particularly as regarded questions with fundamental ideological implications, such as the rights of land tenure in the countryside. Land tenure goes to the heart of most questions of economic and political democracy, particularly in regions like the Brazilian North (Amazon) and the Northeast. Even more than in other parts of Brazil, the vast majority of the land in these areas is formally controlled either by huge private estates, or by agencies of the government such as the military--which by 1985 had become Brazil's largest single landowner.3 Nevertheless, land laws in Brazil are, from colonial times, exceedingly complex, often encouraging extralegal actions such as land seizures (Holston, 1991:695).4 The potential for violence has always been high.
Although agrarian reform became a centrally important national political question after 1985, it has long been a natural barometer of authoritarianism in Brazil because of the chronic privation of the countryside and the fundamentally democratic implications that distributive policies consequently produce. Agrarian reform was increasingly regarded by policy makers in the mid-1980s as a unique opportunity to effectuate an inexpensive--and critically necessary--income redistribution,5 while addressing problems underlying the flood of rural emigrants to Brazil's urban favelas, and the explosion of rural violence. Resistance to agrarian reform, on the other hand, represented an uncompromising mind set, one that tended to see all organized and spontaneous political activity (with a few exceptions) as "communist". This weltanschauung was consistent with authoritarianism. As Juan Linz noted, mobilization and mass politicization are anathema to the authoritarian regime (Linz, 1970; 1973).
The rapid rise in violent rural confrontations after the announcement of an agrarian reform policy in mid-1985, increasingly severe in regions like the North and Northeast because of their large peasant and agrarian labor populations, was widely reported. It was analogous (and related) to, though far less severe than, the urban social violence that had been escalating during the previous decade. Peasants were repeatedly pitted against state authority and increasingly militant and organized landowners in the vortex of land law, and consequent violent clashes over land, increasingly common during the previous decade, became legion. Increasing peasant6 and agrarian labor mobilization associated with the proposed agrarian reform quickly resulted in an explosion of rural violence (see: Amnesty International, 1988; Minc, 1985; Kotscho, 1982; Movimento, 1986; Figueira, 1986; Souza Martins, 1985; 1986), much of it precipitated by large and middle-sized landowners. Considerable evidence suggests, moreover, that such violence was reinforced and "authorized" by the state, despite President Sarney's initially uncompromising support of a thoroughgoing agrarian reform. "Delegative [president-centered] democracy," in O'Donnell's (1994) terms, had clearly not yet emerged, and an authoritarian pact between the socio-political elites and the military continued to dominate policy making in Brazil. The first hints that the "governability" of Brazil would become a major systemic challenge began to be dropped.
Studies of Brazil during the past three decades have often concerned themselves with theory-building in such broad areas as dependency, dependent development, authoritarianism, and the growth of the state, particularly in explaining the endemic weakness of social classes, and especially the weakness of the various national elite fractions. This historical weakness is said to have encouraged "bonapartism" (Evans, 1979:41) in, or the "Portugalization" (Schmitter, 1973) of, Brazil in 1964 and after. Even if the military coup is described as a manifestation of middle class politics, as José Nun describes it in his well-known study, it is necessary to recognize the "extreme heterogeneity" and lack of class consciousness of this group (Nun, 1970:91), and its consequent vulnerability to the relatively autonomous state.
The Brazilian military, which directly intervened to repress a movement for agrarian reform in 1962 (Martins, 1985:21-22), had achieved by the end of the dictatorship the status of a political party in defense of an authoritarian agenda, one which included the encouragement of multinational investment, the continued growth of state corporations, and the protection of unrestricted property rights. Although it had introduced a land statute during the first dictatorial presidency of Castello Branco, the law that eventually became the basis of the land reform of Tancredo Neves, they consistently lacked the "political will" and administrative persistence to bring such programs as PROTERRA, a Northeast land redistribution scheme, to fruition (Ames, 1987b:160-162). Major agricultural interests replaced whatever (albeit minimal) emphasis had been placed upon the peaceful distributive potential of a military-backed limited agrarian reform. The state remained the embodiment of those interests, with the military centrally involved as an institution.7 The extent (or lack thereof) of military withdrawal from the political processes after 1985 is thus implied by the course of such issues as agrarian reform. Not surprisingly, then, along with the open hostility to a thoroughgoing agrarian reform manifested by most state functionaries, much of the military officer corps was said to be in open political opposition to it (The Economist, May 17, 1986:42).
Peasant struggles for land ownership in the 1980s, however, indicated the increasing presence of a vital and dynamic class mobilization in Brazil, including the emergence of a more defined and politically aware social class structure. The exercise of political power by elite political pacts was directly vitiated by broad-based mobilization and the growth of mass political movements. The costs of containment of such movements, in resources and violence, grew exponentially after 1985 and soon implied the need for imminent recourse to the heart of the Weberian state, the "legitimate" means of coercion (the military), as public polls would later demonstrate.8 It also suggested, however, that another military intervention would confront very different political conditions than those encountered in 1964, when a vast majority of the population was relatively apolitical, and military dictatorship only confronted the question of legitimacy directly with those few elite groups willing resist repression after being branded "subversive".
The following study is an attempt to rethink the interrelation of agrarian violence, political pacts, and the rapid breakdown of a vibrant and serious program of agrarian reform introduced by President Sarney in 1985 in light of subsequent crises in the Brazilian polity. Of particular interest in this regard is the relation of the defeat of agrarian reform to uncontrolled social mobilization, the breakdown of civic order, and increasing challenges to established elite interests in Brazil. Two factors, in particular, are crucial: the increasing frequency and intensity of organized agrarian violence, a pattern that mirrored a wider urban tendency; and evidence of the increased extension of, and competition between, political pacts in the political power vacuum that has followed such events as the impeachment of a president and the massive indictment of the congress for broad-based corruption.
Finally, the failure of agrarian reform in Brazil may clarify a complex process of demilitarizing an authoritarian order while preventing broad-based socio-economic change. As Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco, the octogenarian President of the Commission of Constitutional Studies and former Foreign Minister, commented during the zenith of the program,
There has been, in Brazil, an historical paralysis of 21 years. Because of this, the historical acceleration that we are witnessing is shocking. It is that we have stored up a great phase of mental progress and, suddenly, the dike has broken and it has rushed out. Today a channel has been established which is not, perhaps, sufficient to release the accumulated pressure. This is happening with the most force in agrarian reform. Social justice in the countryside has suffered a halt of more than 20 years (Veja, June 4, 1986:8).
The initial success, and ultimate failure, of agrarian reform in Brazil hence offer critical insights into a grand process of national obstructionism.
THE GROWTH OF RURAL VIOLENCE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLITICAL PACTS
The fear of the imminent collapse of the land tenure system, especially in Northeast Brazil, was one of the factors that contributed directly to the military intervention of 1964, although the social mobilization in the countryside had been, by most accounts, considerably more apparent than real. The ligas camponesas, or peasant leagues, were organized by regional social elites, a relatively small number of whom were Marxist in ideological orientation, although much was made in the American press of the most famous organizer, Franciso Julião. One observer argued, in fact, that most of the peasant leagues, which militated in different ways for agrarian reform, were organized and maintained through the Catholic Church with the specific intent of moderating the limited organizational efforts of Marxists (Leeds, 1964:192; Bruneau, 1974:85). The existence of these leagues was highly restricted geographically, and their leadership was exclusively elite, even on the regional level (Leeds, 1964:193-4; Robock, 1963:6).9 Their existence thus "guarantee[d] a vertical dependence upward, ultimately to the presidency of the nation--the nodal center of political and economic power for the entire socio-political and economic system" (Leeds, 1964:197).
The misrepresentation of these very limited agrarian reform efforts of the early 1960s as the first stages of a Castro-style, Marxian revolution in the Brazilian Northeast contributed--along with other factors--to the military intervention of 1964 (Stepan, 1971:156). The utter absence of any national or regional resistance to the coup was later explained by Philippe Schmitter as the product of "delayed-dependent development", which he argued had weakened the class structure to such an extent that groups had no ability to resist, allowing the military to engage in a "Bonapartist" political takeover (1973:188). The concurrent structural crisis, based upon chronic electoral instability, shifting Congressional coalitions, and over-representation in the Congress of elite-dominated regions like the Northeast, which led in Barry Ames's view to a "congress consistently more conservative than the president and produced a legislative deadlock" (Ames, 1987:150), should also be cited.
In the early 1960s, social mobilization in predominantly rural areas, such as the Northeast, was surprisingly rare, articles in U.S. media to the contrary notwithstanding, and the military intervention scarcely elicited any resistance at all.10 In fact, the absence of any spontaneous rural mobilization may ironically have contributed to the military's subsequent, albeit passive, "agrarian reform" program, the "Land Statute,"11 which ultimately became the basis of the campaign for agrarian reform in the mid-1980s. Military support for a de jure program of agrarian reform was not difficult to explain. As Linz observed, the lack of resistance to the coup had created political problems for the military: it made "the rationalization of `saving the country from communism and subversion' questionable" (1973:238). Development programs such as agrarian reform became, at least on paper, the raison d'être of the dictatorship, given the profound rural poverty in the country, especially in the Northeast, where a World Bank study had shown in 1974 such startling indicators in the rural sector as a life expectancy of 27 years, 20 percent unemployment and 50 percent infant mortality (Janvry, 1981:86). Meanwhile, the modest land reform program which had been tentatively suggested by President João Goulart (probably more for rhetorical purposes than actual implementation) had never achieved even a modicum of success, and was quickly and quietly extirpated by the military intervention of 1964.
The limited degree to which agrarian reform efforts of the early 1960s were pursued indicates a relative absence of peasant and agrarian labor mobilization, despite wild North American press reports to the contrary. The frequency and intensity of organized violence in the countryside was similarly low, and there was relatively little evidence of non-elite participation in political pacts, or of growing self-direction of peasant organizations. The state possessed a high capacity to remain relatively autonomous from socio-economic class pressures, as events after 1964 graphically demonstrated.12 Riordan Roett noted that in the Northeast, "the rural workforce...was most susceptible to a restoration of the patrimonial order following the 1964 Revolution" (1984:113). General Castello Branco's Land Statute hence was the patrimonial "escape valve" conceived to prevent social tensions from becoming political tensions while encouraging the growth of large-scale agro-industry (Martins, 1985:35).
The publicity and resource expenditures surrounding agrarian reform after 1964 were confusing, at least in the short term.13 The dictatorship clearly had the power to implement agrarian reform; however, after a short while it became apparent that it did not have the will. Brazilian social scientist Hélio Jaguaribe commented in 1972 about the military regime's "incompatibility even with the most limited and controlled forms of representative democracy" (61). Nevertheless, it continued to emphasize its democratic trappings (Ames, 1987a:167). During this era, commonly regarded as the nadir of the dictatorship, the authoritarian power structure attempted to respond to an agrarian dilemma in areas such as the Northeast through lightly supported schemes of very limited land redistribution (such as PROTERRA) and more subsidized plans of regional out-migration: the Transamazônica highway colonization project, and effective encouragement of a flood of migrants to the slums of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The authoritarian "technocracy" demonstrated time and again, however, its aversion to political mobilization in any form (Martins, 1974: 130). As Barry Ames concluded, by 1974 "a confrontational policy was simply inconceivable--a regime backed for ten years by the upper strata was hardly likely to change horses in mid-flood" (1987b:165).
Virtually no effective agrarian reform was ultimately allowed by the military dictatorship (Bunker, 1985:109-110), clientelism mushroomed (Ames, 1987a:168), while registered deaths from land disputes steadily grew: from 42 between 1965-1970, and 131 from 1971-1975, to 245 from 1976-1980 and 547 from 1981-1985 (Movimento, 1986). The intensification of concentrated land tenure patterns explains this in part: in 1967, estates of over 100 hectares accounted for 46.9 percent of all land in Brazil; in 1984, the figure was 58.3 percent (The Economist, June 8, 1985:40). By the mid-1980s, fewer than 30 percent of rural landowners held 86 percent of the privately-owned land, while nearly 70 percent of rural landowners held only 8 percent (Schneider, 1986:260).
The death of President-Elect Tancredo Neves in April, 1985, placed a Northeastern landowner and longtime head of the military party, José Sarney, as the first post-dictatorial civilian in the presidency. Sarney inherited Neves's political coalition, and hence his program for, but not necessarily his commitment to, agrarian reform. He had never previously expressed any concern for this subject, and was known in his home state of Maranhão as a land speculator. He nevertheless dramatically declared his intention to implement a program just ten weeks after assuming the presidency. This must be seen in retrospect as a dramatic "window of opportunity,"14 coming as it did at an extremely auspicious moment and with the formal and apparently enthusiastic support of a new president who was, himself, an elite Northeastern landowner.
Sarney's plan involved the expropriation, with "fair compensation", of uncultivated private land as well as the accelerated use of public lands, and would be implemented through a new agrarian reform ministry and legislation which had been formally decreed (but never enforced) by the military in 1964. Sarney predicted that 480 million hectares would be distributed to 7.1 million families over a fifteen-year period, with most coming from expropriated private lands (The Economist, June 8, 1985:40; Schneider, 1986:260), so that approximately 35 million people would benefit from the program by the turn of the century (Schneider, 1986: 260). Despite the optimism of these figures, the initial focus upon simple redistribution of land, without an infrastructure for agricultural extension and agrarian development, was not especially promising.
The initial forcefulness and apparent sincerity of the 1985 agrarian reform proposal were probably related to Sarney's attempts to hold Neves's PMDB/PFL coalition together. Its political implications--especially for understanding the democratization of the Brazilian political system--were significant. As O'Donnell notes, the breakdown of authoritarian regimes is likely to lead initially to a "delegative democracy," in which executive authority is largely independent of social forces and, while ultimately isolated, capable of (at least initially) of the exercise of sweeping powers. On the other hand, the authoritarian system that had evolved after 1964 had fostered discrete socio-economic groups that remained fundamentally opposed to the uncontrolled social mobilization, the breakdown of civic order, and the challenge to elite interests implied by a thoroughgoing agrarian reform program. Hence the proposal of such a program by the new president immediately underscored the presence of new, dynamic and effective systemic challenges to presidential rule in this post-dictatorial system. Presidential power was curiously circumscribed, elite political pacts and widespread agrarian violence strangely uncontrolled.
While spontaneous agrarian violence has long been a factor in peasant-landowner and peasant-state relations, the structured, organized character of the violence was something new. Allegations that members of the armed forces were acting as a "military wing" in a political pact with a national landowners organization, the UDR (the Rural Democratic Union), blamed for numerous incidents of assault and murder (Latin American Regional Reports Brazil, September 18, 1986:4; Amnesty International, 1988), and the increasing involvement of Catholic clergy in the conflicts, were widely reported. Furthermore, peasants' associations, including sindicatos rurais (rural unions), responded with organized violence at times, as in 1984 when two hired killers, who had murdered a rural union leader, were killed by more than 1,000 union members who stormed their jail cell (Veja, March 21, 1986:31).
Although much of the rural violence was centered in the "Bico de Papagaio" ("Parrot's Beak"), a narrow part of new state of Tocantins, the problem was national in scope, and egregious in the North and Northeast, with most of the reported victims being agricultural workers, rubber tappers, union leaders, clergy and laity (Latin American Weekly Report, May 23, 1986:2). One national urban union established an alternative "land tribunal" to hear charges of agrarian violence, and President Sarney made feeble attempts to mediate between organized groups;15 nevertheless, there appeared to be little prospect of ending the violence through elite mediation, the traditional form of conflict resolution in Brazil. International pressures had some minimal effect in a few highly-publicized cases, to the apparent chagrin of the military.
Incidents of violence were indicative of the persistence of authoritarianism, and the helplessness or unwillingness of the new president to address this direct challenge to his authority. When a priest, Padre Josimo Morais Tavares, was murdered by a hired killer in Maranhão in May, 1986, his assassination became a national cause célèbre of the proponents of agrarian reform. His confessed killer, allegedly in the pay of large landholders and using an army-issue revolver (Latin America Weekly Report, June 26, 1986:2), was eventually sentenced to a maximum eighteen years in prison after the case received international publicity, although the primary authors of the crime remained at large, unindicted (Veja, April 27, 1988:30-31). João Carlos Batista, a state legislator, lawyer and defender of rural squatters, announced (to the laughter of his colleagues) in the Pará state assembly in December, 1988, that he was receiving numerous death threats at his office and home; he was gunned down a day later in front of his family.16 Francisco (Chico) Mendes, an internationally known organizer of a rubber tappers' union in the upper Amazon, was gunned down (allegedly on the orders of a local cattle rancher) in December, 1988, in similar fashion. Although the immediate international outcry led to federal police intervention in this case (Veja, January 4, 1989:22-23), and the conviction and imprisonment of a local landowner and his son (Veja, January 18, 1989:40),17 their suspicious escape from incarceration was typical of the elite-oriented double standard regarding the prosecution of violence in the countryside. A lawyer from the Catholic Church's Commisão Pastoral da Terra noted from experience that "Chico Mendes was not the first victim and will not be the last. What we have is an unequal war, where justice is not the same for both sides" (Veja, January 4, 1989:24-25). The assassination of an internationally-known rural labor organizer, Expedito Ribeiro da Silva, barely two years later underscored this point (Veja, 13 February 1991:26; Chicago Tribune, 5 February 1991: 6).
Three major groupings defined competitive class positions in expanding the scope of political pacts related to rural violence: the landowners' organizations, and especially the UDR; the reform-oriented sectors of the Brazilian Catholic clergy and laity; and the peasants' and urban workers' organizations, particularly the agricultural associations and the industrial labor unions.
The UDR was formed in April, 1986, by landowners in southern Pará with the support of the Society for the Defense of Family, Tradition and Property, an explicitly right-wing political organization. By mid-1986, it reportedly had branches in as many as 11 states (Latin American Regional Reports Brazil, September 18, 1986:4), and by its own claim, 5,000-10,000 members. Under the leadership of Ronaldo Caiado and Plínio Junqueira, the organization raised money through the donation of cattle (7,000 by June, 1986) for the stated purpose of financing election campaigns (Veja, June 18, 1986:37), and the unstated, but evident, purpose of funding violent resistance to infringements of traditional rural land tenure.18 Most of the members of the UDR, in fact, were middle-sized landholders who appeared to be manipulated ideologically by such fears as the imminent erosion of property rights. The emergence of the political pact that resisted agrarian reform represented a "popularization", or broadening, of elite politics, a potential threat in itself to presidential authority.
Specific examples of the organization of the UDR emphasize this group's ability to attract a contributing membership that far exceeded the elite interests that it appeared to represent. The ideological framework that supported this extended membership continually reinforced its "status" (ostensibly imparted by belonging to the UDR) upon middle and small landowners who could not hope to benefit from the organization's political goals. The UDR chapter in the Northeastern state of Maranhão was a particularly striking example of the incipient class mobilization that underwrote this organization: it attracted 800 landowners during its first two months of existence, with the first 27 chapter founders contributing Cz$10,000 (about US$730) each, in addition to donations of cattle for auction. As one of the chapter founders emphasized in promotional terms, "the UDR will be strong because it brings together men who have money."19 He might have added, "and those that aspire to having money." The opening of a UDR office in the remote and particularly violent "Parrot's Beak" in September of 1987, with a membership of 2,500 large and middle-sized landowners (Folha de São Paulo, September 20, 1987:A-9), further suggested the violent purpose of the organization.
By late 1987, the UDR had established itself as a major conservative power broker in the constitutional assembly, and particularly in the assembly's powerful centrão ("big center"): it claimed 230,000 members nationwide. The UDR was said to have financed the reorganization the Brazilian right through its frequent auctions of donated cattle, and repeatedly to have mustered the faithful votes of 105 federal deputies. Caiado was touted (by another landowner organizer) as "our Lula of the right, a phenomenon of the masses, one of the great leaders of this country" (Veja, November 11, 1987:29). The subsequent defeat of the agrarian reform program in key provisions of the Constitution of 1988, which asserted unconditional rights to "productive" land (without defining the term) seems to have proven his point (Constituição, 1988: Art. 185, II).
The reform-oriented clergy and laity of the Brazilian Catholic Church served as catalysts for the organization of peasants in support of agrarian reform, while also militating directly for this reform, as a number of works document (e.g., Paiva, 1985; Esterci, 1984; Comissão Pastoral, 1985; Silva, 1987). The Catholic Church has been a long-term organizer of rural unions in the Northeast, and had over 50 of them under its aegis as early as 1962 (Bruneau, 1974:92). Many Catholic clergy reacted stridently to, and were directly threatened by,20 the mobilization of the UDR; one bishop referred to the organization as "demoníaca" ("diabolical") (Veja, June 18, 1986:36), and another Northeastern bishop who has been directly involved with land reform efforts worried that the Brazilian government had allowed itself to be intimidated by the organization.21 Although it was probably the communidades de base (basic communities) that were the Church-sponsored organizations most deeply involved with agrarian reform efforts, equally important in this regard were the large numbers of clergy who ministered directly to the rural poor, and who found themselves to be increasingly committed to, and involved in working toward, policies of agrarian reform.
On one level, the question of agrarian reform in Brazil suggests a model of traditional Brazilian inter-elite conflict, with landowners and pro-reform clergy engaged in a familiar battle for power. As one description put it, they are locked in a "vicious circle, in which bishops accuse landowners of arming themselves and landowners accuse priests of arming peasants [posseiros]" (Veja, June 18, 1986:37). The broadening of the base, however, and the increasing mobilization of the peasantry, reflected the profound and pervasive transformation of rural society that was taking place.
The politicization of peasants' groups immediately hindered the ability of elite-centered pacts to manipulate the Brazilian polity, and hence challenged the future power of elite-centered political pacts. Latin American culture has frequently been characterized as an individualistic and atomizing environment that discourages significant cooperative action outside of the extended family. It is described as encouraging "monistic democracy", in which vertical linkages and authoritarian power structures flourish (Dealy, 1974). Climactic conditions (e.g., the worst drought of the century in the Northeast, 1979-1984 [Veja, March 18, 1981:44-57]), national economic crisis, the effects of protracted organizing efforts among the rural poor by the Catholic Church and other organizations, the advent of television to the countryside, and the lengthy political abertura (opening) that characterized the last twelve years of the dictatorship all contributed to a rapid rise in the activity of peasant organizations in Brazil immediately after 1985.
The increasing land "invasions" by peasants and the steady growth in peasants' agricultural associations indicated that there has been a much higher degree of self-direction among the peasantry of the Brazil after 1985 than at any time in the past. Furthermore, political and organizational commitments appear to go well beyond the short-term resolution of subsistence needs. The narrow pursuit of an individualistic (or family-structured) struggle for survival may no longer adequately explain the political behavior of many groups that are lumped under the term "peasantry." A peasant leader of one Northeastern agricultural association, the Agricultural Association of São Joaquim (Pernambuco), commented in an interview in 1986 that "as individuals, it hasn't worked out. We want to leave this organizational legacy (herança de organização) for our children and grandchildren" (Istoé, April 16, 1986:34). Another peasant leader argued that "without a plan for agrarian reform, slavery will continue."22
THE BREAKDOWN OF AGRARIAN REFORM, 1985-1988
The course of agrarian reform policies after May, 1985, is perhaps the clearest illustration of the apparent breakdown in the capacity of the post-dictatorial Brazilian state to remain relatively autonomous from class pressures. While the introduction (and at least initial prosecution) of the agrarian reform program by a president who represented countervailing interests may have suggested the kind of independent executive authority that O'Donnell has argued (1994) is the hallmark of "delegative democracy," Sarney's program differed substantially from the military's approach to agrarian reform, despite his use of the military's 1964 decree legislation as its basis. Indeed, it had been the threat of mobilization associated with such social phenomena as the organization of the peasantry that had initiated Brazil's military dictatorship in 1964, and it was the mobilization of workers and peasants immediately after the transference of power in 1985 which brought the coercive "internal security" function of the military once more to the forefront of national attention.23
Another critical element of the immediate post-1985 era was that key military officers, the military ministers in Sarney's cabinet, appear to be acting more like organizers and members of a political pact than as mere instruments or manifestations of authoritarianism à la Linz and O'Donnell. Furthermore, mobilization, at least by some groups, was unexpectedly tolerated--and perhaps even encouraged--by the military ministers: on the same day that the tanks and troops stifled the oil refinery strike, over a million "agricultural producers", landowners of middle- and large-size properties, demonstrated in more than 100 Brazilian cities, blocking the entrances to over a thousand banks, and causing massive traffic jams in open violation of the law--all with minimal response from the security forces.24 As a colonel of the military police in the Northeastern state of Bahia reportedly remarked, "we must be tolerant, because [this] protest was peaceful" (Veja, March 18, 1987:26).
The agrarian reform program had collapsed for all intents and purposes within a year after its dramatic initiation by President Sarney. The government plans had originally called for redistribution of 43 million hectares (almost 95 million acres) to 1.4 million families within the first three years (Veja, July 9, 1986:32); this was later scaled back to 150,000 families and 850,000 hectares during the first year (Latin American Regional Reports Brazil, November 27, 1986:5). At the end of that first year, about 9,000 families had been relocated and about 273,000 hectares appropriated by the government for redistribution.25 Very little of the land was expropriated from large, established landholders, whether or not they were using it. Furthermore, the program looked more like a simple land redistribution than a coherent and integrated program of agrarian reform: the vast majority of the new landholders, lacking any modern agricultural equipment or techniques, were said to be unable to grow productive plots and were "living in shacks equal to those of the favelas (slums) of the big cities--and even going hungry" (Veja, July 9, 1986:32). As one agricultural cooperative officer noted, "the thing that most affects agrarian reform is the line of credit."26
Emblematic of the weakening of agrarian reform was the failure of Nélson Ribeiro, Sarney's initial appointee as Minister of Agrarian Reform and Development, to retain his position much beyond the program's first year of operation. Ribeiro's appointment had represented a concession to one contingent of the "Liberal Front," the PMDB, the party that had emerged from official opposition status during the military's enforced two-party system to become the major opposition party. Sarney was a recent and politically vulnerable adherent to the Liberal Front, and needed the support of the PMDB. Ribeiro, who was strongly backed by the Catholic Church and equally strongly opposed by a political pact comprised of landowners and the military (Latin America Weekly Report, June 6, 1986:11), made several political errors during his brief tenure, including a much publicized--and apparently inadvertent--expropriation decree for the município of Londrina (in southern Paraná) in July, 1985, for which he was publicly humiliated.27 His oblique references to this in his 1987 account were followed with his observation, ironic in retrospect, that the new constitution (then in its early drafts) would be the ultimate arbiter of agrarian reform in Brazil (Ribeiro, 1987:49).
José Eli da Veiga, then an official working with the agrarian reform program, describes the rapid emergence of a conservative political coalition led by the influential newspaper, the Estado de São Paulo, whose owners, the Mesquita family, were themselves latifuniários (Veiga, 1990:88), in strident opposition to agrarian reform. Engaging in what Veiga described as a "MaCarthyist campaign" against those directly involved with implementing the program (89), the paper later referred to the government program as "the Marxist agrarian reform" (111), language that was most likely to encourage the resistance of groups and institutions linked to the authoritarian period.
The military, through the National Security Council, subsequently submitted its own agrarian reform proposal, which revived the Amazon colonization scheme of the early 1970s, the distribution of public lands (most of which were inappropriate for long-term farming), and avoided the expropriation of large estates. By September, 1985, Jornal do Brasil declared in a headline that "agrarian reform is once again a military question" (cited in Veiga, 1990:121). Although Ribeiro was able to block the military proposal, he did so at the cost of his own political efficacy. When Sarney appointed Colonel Pedro Dantas as head of INCRA in May, 1986, Ribeiro had never even met his new "right hand man"; he had learned of Dantas's appointment, in fact, from a television program, and had drafted his final letter of resignation within the month. Bishop Ivo Lorscheiter, President of the National Council of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB), after learning of the resignation, declared that "we are living in Brazil as we did in the worst periods of the dictatorship, in which anyone who defends the interests of workers can be persecuted or defamed" (Latin America Weekly Report, June 6, 1986:11; Veja, June 4, 1986:45-46).
Ribeiro's replacement, Dante de Oliveira, was also something of a concession to the left-wing of the Liberal Front, but not necessarily to the program of agrarian reform. As the new prefeito (mayor) of Cuiabá, the 34-year-old appointee had been heralded as an excellent administrator, but he also had been an active participant in the early 1970s in a Marxist resistance group, MR-8, later serving as a PMDB federal deputy. The leader of one of the rightist opposition parties, Amaral Netto, noted that "Dante is inexperienced, without technical understanding of the agrarian question and, with the MR-8, the landowners can use this against him if he does something else radical." Although one of his PMDB colleagues from São Paulo joked that he would "communize agrarian reform," the conspicuous absence of the three military ministers at his swearing in (Veja, June 4, 1986:44), and his subsequent statement to the press that he would pursue a policy that was "possible" (Veja, July 9, 1986:33), reinforced the impression that his appointment was designed to maintain Sarney's political coalition while further paralyzing the policy of agrarian reform. The national economic crisis that began in earnest in November, 1986, completed the paralysis. By April, 1987, Dante de Oliveira's only concrete policies had been to "reform" his cabinet (as the press joked), and to arrange a subsidy for a land acquisition by a major corporation. His letter of resignation, submitted on May 22, caused barely a ripple in the press (Veja, May 27, 1987:34).
Marcos Freire, Dante de Oliveira's replacement, was initially isolated in his position, and ignored by the media. He nevertheless moved energetically to re-initiate the program of agrarian reform, making contacts with members of the Brazilian Congress and with the Church. His refusal publicly to shake hands with Ronaldo Caiado, of the UDR, after a private meeting with him in early September, 1987, did merit some press attention (Veja, September 9, 1987:29), given Caiado's continued rise as a leading conservative star, and the UDR's alleged routine use of physical intimidation and assassination. Freire was killed a week later when his air force jet crashed on takeoff from an airport in southern Pará, one of the areas of highest rural violence. His obituary in Veja described MIRAD, the Ministry of Agrarian Reform and Development, as a "fictitious ministry" (Veja, September 16, 1987:26-27).
The next two ministers of MIRAD, Jader Barbalho and Leopoldo Bessone, did little if anything to advance agrarian reform. Shortly after he took office, Barbalho, in fact, called on the military to eject squatters from his own estate, Fazenda Chão Preto, in western Pará (Veja, September 21, 1987:45). MIRAD was rendered politically impotent by the Constitution of 1988, which only allowed for the disappropriation of land "that is not fulfilling a social function," and specifically excluded disappropriation of "productive land;" it promised that an unspecified future law "will guarantee special treatment for productive land and will set the norms for the fulfillment of requirements relative to social function" (Constituição, Art. 185:87). The most important questions of agrarian reform, then, "who gets what, when and how," were left open, and virtually any "productive" venture (e.g., one cow on a million hectares) theoretically disqualified a prospective expropriation. When MIRAD was formally abolished in January, 1989, the Ministry had just moved to purchase a decaying building in Brasília for about US$10 million, an amount that would have established 4,320 farmers on productive plots according to government estimates (Veja, January 25, 1989:38).
CONCLUSION
A rethinking of the failure of agrarian reform after 1985 suggests that O'Donnell's model of "delegative democracy" was not operative in Brazil, and that, just as in early 1994, the nation's ungovernability had manifested itself in political and socio-economic crises relating directly to the unwillingness of elites to conduct themselves in system-maintaining behavior. Two key questions stand out: first, why did President Sarney introduce an ambitious program of agrarian reform in the first place; and second, why was the program allowed to fail so ignominiously?
The second question, the most telling of the two, is in some respects the easiest to answer. Political pacts appear to have dominated both the support for and opposition to the program. Veiga argues that despite the critical economic need for the elimination of a latifúndio-based agrarian pattern, large capitalists joined forces in a political pact with the latifundiários out of habit--this, after all, had been the prevailing dominant pact in the last stage of the dictatorship (Veiga, 1990:149). By the mid-1980s, many elite observers had come to believe that agrarian reform could have little economic impact on Brazil: it was, rather, a potentially socially and politically significant policy. Veiga concluded that this relegation of agrarian reform to the status of an expensive social welfare program ultimately served as the excuse for its evisceration (1990:150).
A political explanation of the quixotic rise and fall of agrarian reform likewise tends to emphasize the importance of pacts. Sarney came to the presidency rather unexpectedly, as a rightist `national-unity' vice-presidential candidate in a broad-based opposition coalition who succeeded to the presidency upon the unexpected death of the president-elect. When he became president, Sarney had little public following and ostensibly required at least some support from the left and center-left wings of his coalition in order to continue in office. In this interpretation, Sarney might have raised the issue of agrarian reform somewhat disingenuously, assuming that it would quickly fail as he maintained Neves's coalition. His eventual movement away from that coalition was, in this interpretation, a foregone conclusion. By March, 1987, one of Sarney's favorite expressions was said to be: "The military officers are the ones that don't cause me problems" (Veja, July 10, 1985:21). Yet another political explanation for the failure of agrarian reform was that Sarney was politically ineffectual. Agrarian reform was not, after all, his only political failure as president. One (unnamed) Minister said in 1985 that "Sarney is like a soccer player who dribbles with rare competence and, upon reaching the goal, trips over the ball" (Veja, March 18, 1987:27). However, failure to sustain a dominant ruling coalition (and hence establish a pattern of governability in Brazil) should probably not be compared metaphorically to a missed scoring attempt. Moreover, this does not fully explain the way in which a serious plan for agrarian reform was introduced, and then dropped after 1988.
In this latter regard, Sarney's initial dependence upon a popular-democratic political pact, after he had abandoned the military party in 1983-84, and then "accidently" succeeded to the presidency, may have necessitated his active and immediate support of a policy like agrarian reform. Reaction to the issue, however, became tantamount to a jinni in a bottle. The extensive political mobilization that resulted on both sides of the question, the continuing (and growing) agrarian violence and the increasingly self-directed character of peasant behavior that followed, suggest that a political pattern other than "delegative democracy" was initially at work in Brazil.
The growth in the strength and assertiveness of socio-economic groups as they penetrated and even replaced the once-powerful elite political pacts was highly significant. O'Donnell's analysis of post-authoritarian states, which embraces dependentista and Bonapartist interpretations (O'Donnell, 1994:62), assumes that class mobilization--with the power to dominate the state--will not initially dictate policy. Hence, the vulnerability of the Brazilian state in 1985 to the manipulation of elite pacts seems to suggest the persistence of another pattern, increasingly associated with Brazil, sometimes characterized as a recipe for protracted ungovernability. While apparently close to the "delegative democracy" that O'Donnell has recently described (1994), in which wild swings of presidential popularity accompany "weak institutionalization" and a general indifference toward strengthening it (1990:62), this new Brazilian pattern involves an elite-dominated Congress (recently weakened by a severe corruption scandal) with the constitutional power, but not the responsibility, to govern, and a presidency (recently weakened by impeachment) with the responsibility, but not the power, to govern. Key elite interest groups, and the military establishment, remain as likely political arbiters in this setting.
The failure of agrarian reform as it applies to political pacts is particularly interesting in this regard. Two aggressive elite sectors seemed to have emerged from the dictatorial period: a strengthened `industrial bourgeoisie', which, for a variety of reasons, was not necessarily authoritarian, and could, under the right conditions, accept membership in a political pact which supported liberalization, if not always democratization; and the mercantile, or latifundiário, sector, which was fundamentally authoritarian, as its response to the agrarian reform program graphically illustrated.28 The failure of agrarian reform in Brazil underscored the growing power of this latter group after 1985. When he assumed the presidency in that year, Sarney was the unlikely candidate of a pact between the industrial bourgeoisie and elite representatives of the South-Central region's `popular classes' (mostly urbanized), organized in the PMDB and the PP (Popular Party, the centrist opposition party of Tancredo Neves). Although many of the largely Northeastern and agrarian-based PDS (Democratic Social Party) congressional representatives, including Sarney himself, had deserted the Figueiredo government during the previous year, their long-term economic dependence upon the authoritarian state meant that their natural ally would continue to be the military.
Sarney was forced out of his initial dependence upon an industrial-bourgeois-popular alliance to an increasing reliance upon the mercantile bourgeois-military alliance. However, the increased mobilization of "popular" groups linked to each of these pacts increased the fluidity and unpredictability of this situation. Although his successor, Fernando Collor de Mello, was initially able to reduce the influence of the military to some extent, events leading to his impeachment in 1992 revitalized the role of the military. Both Itamar Franco and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the past and current presidents, have been reluctant to oppose the anti-distributive policies of the congress. On 3 February 1994, for example, the congress passed a landowners' law that exempted latifundiários from paying interest and debt repayment charges on agricultural loans provided by the Banco do Brasil (BB) since 1979. This policy is likely to cost billions of dollars and could even bankrupt the BB (Latin American Weekly Report, 17 February 1994:71). While Cardoso has emphasized a very limited agrarian reform as part of his presidential profile, it remains clear that his own political support base will not tolerate major change. The "window of opportunity" for a thoroughgoing agrarian reform has apparently passed.
As Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira concluded in 1985, after the death of Tancredo Neves, and prior to his assuming the position of Finance Minister:
Brazil confronts three alternatives...1)the formation of a liberal bourgeois pact, with a base in the grande bourgeoisie and the conservative middle bourgeoisie; 2) a popular democratic pact with [its] base in the middle technobureaucratic and middle bourgeois classes and in organized labor; 3) economic stagnation and social discord, stemming from the fact that neither of the two pacts are able to become hegemonic and, principally, confront with success the grave economic crisis that the country faces (Pereira, 1985:211-212).
In the long term, some form of hegemony based upon a variation of the second pact seems plausible. National industrial development over the past 20 years has contributed both to a stronger and more capable industrial elite, and to a new awareness of, if not always participation in, the process of socio-economic development by at least some of the popular sectors. The ongoing political and economic crises in Brazil are, of course, counteracting influences upon this. The profound breakdown of political and social order in Brazil is the direct result of the unwillingness of elite sectors to sacrifice some of their short-term perquisites for the long-term survival of the system. The rise and fall of agrarian reform between 1985 and 1988 substantiates an ongoing question of political pacts and the governability of Brazil.
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NOTES
1A political pact, in the general Latin American context, is: "an explicit, but not always publicly explicated or justified, agreement among a select set of actors which seeks to define (or, better, to redefine) rules governing the exercise of power on the basis of mutual guarantees for the "vital interests" of those entering into it" (O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986:37). In the post-1985 Brazilian context, dominant political pacts have represented self-interested groups of political elites generally associated with the period of the dictatorship. That they continue to be vitally influential barriers to democratization in Brazil is evidenced by the profound corruption scandals of 1992 and 1993-94, and by the repeated defeat of democratic candidates and initiatives over the past decade.
2As Schmitter noted in reference to Marx's interpretation of Bonapartism, "the cornerstone of this authoritarian edifice is what Marx referred to as `die verselbständigten Machte der Exekutivgewalt'--loosely translated as `the process whereby executive power becomes progressively more independent.'" Schmitter, "The `Portugalization'", p. 187. This relates closely to Nicos Poulantzas's (1975) concept of the "relative autonomy of the state."
3The army owned five million hectares, and the Office of the General Staff of the Armed Forces owned another four million, all in the Amazon. There were, of course, numerous other properties owned by the armed forces throughout the country (Veja, June 8, 1988:49). It is of no small significance, moreover, that José Sarney, a major landowner and land speculator, became the first civilian to serve as President of Brazil after the demise of the dictatorship in 1985.
4Holston argues that the complexity of land laws in Brazil originated in colonial days in the interests of local hegemony--the transfer of crown land to local elites served as a "means of achieving autonomy for the colony." Nevertheless, "then, as now, land seizures did help poor settlers gain access to land and were recognized as legitimate on the basis of customary rights if productively occupied" (1991:722).
5Personal interview with Dr. Miguel F. S. Kozma, advisor to the Ministry of Agrarian Reform, July 17, 1987, São Paulo, Brazil.
6Use of the term "peasant" in this study is imprecise given the current stage of development in Brazil. People thus referred include camponeses (literally, dwellers in the countryside), parceiros (homesteaders, or squatters), bóias-frias (migrant agricultural laborers), colonos (settlers and/or tenant farmers). Eric Wolf calls attention to this imprecision when he notes in general terms that "peasants...are rural cultivators whose surpluses are transferred to a dominant group of rulers that uses the surpluses both to underwrite its own standard of living and to distribute the remainder to groups in society that do not farm but must be fed for their specific goods and services in turn" (Wolf, 1966:3-4).
7The extent of direct military involvement in policy making during the first civilian presidency of José Sarney (1985-1990), in fact, manifestly suggests that, as political scientist David Fleischer put it, "the military basically retained control" (Macleans, January 19, 1987:20). Certain policies in particular emerged in this regard as indicators of policy content by virtue of the fundamental problems that they addressed, or the central role that they played (and continue to play) in the scheme of democratization and demilitarization of the Brazilian polity. Agrarian reform was central in this regard.
8The growing popularity of, and confidence in, the military institution by the Brazilian public during this period of turmoil was exemplified in a popular poll which rated the military at 53 percent, far above categories such as civilian politicians, the president, the Congress, etc. (Veja, January 11, 1989:35).
9Eric Hobsbawm, in describing traditional peasant organizations in the Brazilian Northeast, noted their tendency to be messianic and apolitical. When they became political, as with the rise of Padre Cícero in the state of Ceará from 1914 to 1934, their leadership tended to be coopted by regional and national elites and, in any event, "the movements which stood behind men of [Cicero's] kind, and were able to give them the equivalent of patronage and influence, were themselves unable either to enter official politics or to change its character" (Hobsbawm, 1970:50).
10It can be argued, on the other hand, that the military's traditional role as "poder moderador" (moderating power) discouraged resistance on the assumption that their seizure of power would--once again--be very temporary. Given the chronic desperation of the Northeastern peasantry, however, this explanation would appear to be irrelevant had there been any significant degree of mobilization at all.
11Martins notes that "the Statute opened access to the land from the standpoint of large property owners, but closed off access to the land from the standpoint of the great mass of workers without land..." (1985:22).
12As one account put it, "during most of the 21 years of military
rule...the idea of expropriating private farms was tantamount to subversion" (The Economist, 8 June 1985: 40). Disappropriation of unused land almost never took place. Between 1965 and 1981, for example, the military government issued only 124 disappropriation decrees, while there were over 1,000 land conflicts (Martins, 1985:22).
13As one observer noted in 1970, "the military government since 1964 has accomplished more in the field of land reform legislation and implementation than previous governments. The lack of action under previous regimes was in large part due to the impossibility of passing land reform legislation in parliaments controlled by landed and traditional interests" (Cline, 1970:172).
14Interviews conducted by the author in Northeast Brazil in 1991 and 1992 indicated a prevalent feeling that the opportunity to realize salutary effects (in income redistribution and the attenuation of social conflict) from agrarian reform had passed by 1988.
15Sarney appointed a military officer with links to landowners, Col. Pedro Dantas, to head INCRA (Latin America Weekly Report, July 1986). Although he asked Justice Minister Paulo Brossard to come up with a plan for disarming landowners who were currently evicting peasants, Brossard, a rural landowner himself, was said to be angry with the Church, which he felt was organizing many of the land "invasions" (Latin America Weekly Report, 13 June 1986:4).
16Istoé/Senhor, December 14, 1988:32-33. He is at least the third lawyer to be killed in Pará in this way in recent years, and although there was evidence that pointed to a specific landowner, little has yet been done to investigate the crime.
17They later "escaped" from prison and remain at large.
18E.g., The Economist, May 17, 1986:42; House, 1986. A Brazilian anthropologist, Octávio Velho, recently commented that "having overthrown the military regime, the Brazilian society is discovering that it continues to have very strong elements of authoritarianism within it--and an example of this is the creation of the UDR" (Veja, June 18, 1986:38).
19Veja, 18 June 1986:41. As The Economist reported, "opponents of agrarian reform include most congressmen, cabinet members and state governors (who are invariably landowners). Business organisations, much of the armed forces and the conservative daily Estado de São Paulo also oppose it" (May 17, 1986:42).
20I encountered palpable fear when, on July 21, 1987, I interviewed a representative of the Comissão Pastoral da Terra at a Church facility in Fortaleza, Ceará. Insisting upon complete anonymity, she described to me the death threats that she had recently received, and the pervasive climate of fear and violence in the state.
21Personal interview with Bishop Dom José Brandão de Castro, Aracaju, Sergipe, August 5, 1987.
22Personal interview, Sergipe, Brazil, August 1, 1987.
23In December, 1986, military police, regular troops and tanks mobilized in the streets to quell a general strike called by unions in São Paulo to protest tax increases (Macleans, January 19, 1987: 19); again, in March, 1987, tanks, troops and military police stopped an oil refinery strike in São Paulo, while the navy occupied striking merchant seamen's positions (Veja, March 18, 1987:20-27). In November, 1988, soldiers killed three stiking steelworkers after tanks and troops surrounded an occupied steel mill (Veja, November 16, 1988).
24Veja, March 18, 1987:24. The article noted that "in Goiânia, where 15 tractors and 10 trucks blocked the city's transit, the leader of the demonstration, Salvador Farina, state president of the UDR, affirmed the [demonstration's] protection by the law--from the back of a Military Police motorcycle" (26).
25One of the very few expropriated landholders, from the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, who has been fighting expropriation for years through the courts, complains that "the government persecuted me politically because I was in Cuba" (Veja, July 9, 1986:33).
26Personal interview with José Enaldo Reis, Malhador, Sergipe, Brazil, August 1, 1987.
27Presidential spokesperson Fernando César Mesquita called Ribeiro's actions "idiocy" ("uma burrice"), and later joked with the press about retracting his characterization (Veja, July 10, 1985:24-5). Sarney had unwittingly signed the decree, and was publicly embarrassed by the episode, declaring that "this minister [will] kill me of a heart attack" ("Esse ministro me mata do coração").
28Luiz Bresser Pereira, who became the Finance (Fazenda) Minister of Brazil in 1987, noted that the "mercantile (speculative or latifundiária) faction of the Brazilian bourgeoisie is intrinsically authoritarian. It has always depended upon mechanisms of primitive accumulation in order to appropriate economic surplus. This mercantile bourgeoisie, still dominant in many northeastern and central western states, is and always has been authoritarian, because it needs a strong state to realize its accumulation. The industrial bourgeoisie, though far from being independent of the state, is not necessarily authoritarian for structural reasons: Its basic mechanism for the appropriation of surplus is surplus value. The entrepreneur's profit is thus realized in the market, through the classic exchange of equivalents, in which workers sell their labor power and capitalists sell their commodities in the market for their respective values....When pressured by the popular classes, the industrial bourgeoisie tends to adopt or accept a democratic posture, because it is a very numerous dominant class that needs institutionalized mechanisms to alternate power among its various groups and factions whose natural tendency is division" (Pereira, 1984: 194).