Assentamentos in Rio Grande do Sul

After spending time getting to know the Levante Popular Juventude, and their luta in Porto Alegre, I visited an assentamento or agricultural community of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Desempregos (Unemployed Workers Movement). The MTD was created in 1999 in Rio Grande dol Sul and has spread to inlcude some 10 other Brazilian states. The movement is focused at creating better job security and opportunities for the working class, and also works closely with the MST and other social movements.

The Assentamento Belo Monte (Beautiful Hill) is the oldest assentamento of the MTD, and is one of seven in Rio Grande do Sul. It is located 45 minutes outside of Porto Alegre, and is composed of 35 families who each manage 10 hectares of land. Due to its close proximity to Porto Alegre, many family members commute to work in the city, while others work the land to produce for family consumption.

The MTD is a young cousin of the MST and works to connect more urban-oriented families and workers with better options. One very interesting aspect of the assentamento, is the mentality of the city or peripheria that the families bring to the countryside. Living in a favela or in the periphery of a city cultivates a certain city mentality that is difficult to shed once family or youth move to the city.

After spending a few days in Assentamento Belo Monte, I travelled to Viamao, a smaller city outside of Porto Alegre, and and stayed a few days in Assentmanto Tiaraju, which is also home to the Escola Estuadual of Rio Grande dol Sul, which hosts classes and conferences of the MST year round. While I was at the Escola, there were only a few MST members there who worked in and around the Escola, however the week after I left commenced a two week course of political formation for MST youth and also a 4 day state-wide conference of the MST.

Assentamento Tiaraju is composed of 350 families, and totals some 10,000 hectares. The land previously pertained to a weathly businessmen who also owned the conservative newspaper of Porto Alegre, however he defaulted on loans and ended up ceding his fazenda to the government, who was able to distribute it the MST; however this method of land aquisition is not very common in Brazil. The IMF and World Bank support a model of land redistribution that is somewhat similar, and entails the governemnt buying up land and fazendas at face price and then

distributing them to MST families, who then have to repay the price of the land after a certain number of years.

The fazenda formerly was a monoculture farm of rice production. Today each of the 350 families have 10-15 hectares for family production, in addition to a cooperative that manages a small scale production or organice rice, using the irrigation and infraestructure that the old rice fazenda left.

The Assentamento Tiaraju is a successful example of an MST assentemento, due to its large area of land for each family, proximity to Viamao (15 min) and Porto Alegre (45 min) which allow market access and also employment options, and also the successful internal organization of the assentmanento, which has a number of successful cooperativos.