Documents

Key Documents of National Churches

Brazil: The Church and the Problem of Land (1980)

The price the Brazilian Church has paid for making the struggle over land one of its priorities has been high. In 1986 alone, fifty church workers, including priests, were murdered over the issue. The house of Cardinal Aloisio Lorscheider was bombed and gunmen barely missed shooting Bishop Marcelo Carvatheira, wounding instead a priest standing next to him at a meeting of small farmers. Many rural families in Brazil have worked plots of land for decades, even centuries, without having to concern themselves with land titles. But their claims, being undocumented, can be questioned. When entrepreneurs seek large plots of land for mass cultivation, government officials eager for agribusiness (and often a profit of their own) begin evicting these families from the land. Estimates for Brazil put 5,000 entrepreneurs as owning or controlling 50 percent of the arable land.

The Church has actively supported the rural poor by means of agrarian leagues, advocacy before the government, and publicizing outrageous situations to larger audiences to gain public support. Selections from a key document are presented here.

l9. Financial incentive policies deviate the money that belongs to all 'or the use of a minority, without regard for the demands of the common good. Rather than being utilized on projects to serve the public, this money is made available for large companies to use as heir own. Nevertheless, even the government acknowledges that most of the food in our country comes from small producers, who thus far have not been favored by any tax or fiscal policies. This policy thrust shows that the state is committed to serving the interests of he large economic groups.

20. The policy of providing incentives in the Amazon region has not increased productivity on large cattle ranches, whose land usage is less intensive than that of small producers. The conclusion can be drawn that, for the present, the large economic groups are simply trying to reap the benefits of fiscal incentives.

21. Moreover, in the Amazon, large companies are invading the rivers with fishing boats equipped with cold storage. By intensifying predatory fishing, they are causing hunger in the riverbank settlements of people who fish by hand to complement their poor diet.

22. People fishing by hand along costal areas also suffer the effects of tourism projects and industrial waste dumping.

The Issue of the Lands Belonging to Indigenous Peoples

23. No native community in contact with our national society has been free from assaults on its lands.

24. Despite the fact that the the Indian Statute is in effect, conflicts in indigenous areas are becoming increasingly violent and widespread. Such conflicts are connected to the following factors: the fact that their lands are not surveyed; the invasion of their lands after they have been surveyed; the fact that FUNAI [government agency for indigenous peoples] takes over and commercializes the natural resources of those lands; the prejudice against Indians, seeing them as an obstacle to development; the failure to recognize that their lands belong to them by right as peoples; ignorance of the specific requirements that flow from the relation of Indians to their land, in accordance with their culture, their practices, customs, and historic memory; in sum, the fact that the Indians are completely excluded from the policy toward indigenous peoples, both in its formulation and in its execution.

Migrations and Violence in the Countryside

28. All kinds of violence are committed against these people (settlers and Indians) in order to push them off the land. In these instances of violence, it has been abundantly proven that those involved range from professional killers and gunslingers to government agents and even judges. It is not a rare sight to observe for one's self the gravest irregularity of hired killers and police joining forces to carry out sentences of land seizure....

Responsibility for the Situation

33. The responsibility is not God's, even though some people convey that impression when they say, "things are like this because God wills it." It is not God's will that the people suffer and live in misery. 34. It may be that working people are responsible for not being more united and better organized. However, the people have been prevented from participating and deciding the fate of our country.

35. The greatest responsibility falls on those who impose and maintain in Brazil a way of life and work that makes some wealthy at the cost of the poverty or misery of the majority....

36. This occurs when property is an absolute good and is used as an instrument of exploitation. This situation has become exacerbated in the path that economic development is taking in our country, chosen without popular participation....

Concentration of Capital and Concentration of Power

38. As a result of the unrestrained quest for profit, the goods produced by the work of all are concentrated in the hands of a few. Goods, capital, and ownership of the land and the resources in it are concentrated; political power is even more concentrated, in a process of accumulation that results from the exploitation of labor and the social and political marginalization of most of our people.

39. We are witnessing a broad process in which economic groups are expropriating the peasants and farm workers. Unfortunately, the very definition of the government's policies with regard to land problems is based on an ideal of social development that is unacceptable to a humanist and Christian vision of society....

42. Because of the scarcity of land and exorbitant prices for it in their own areas, these farmers are unable to broaden their own chances to find work and to guarantee for their children a chance to continue working as they grow up and form their own families. Their only alternative is to migrate....

44. Another factor that discourages peasants is their utter inability to sell their products commercially and the ridiculous sum they receive for their work....

46. Nor can we ignore a certain perverse character in the price mechanisms of agricultural food products. Food that the urban consumer regards as expensive and that the peasant regards as cheap and not sufficiently remunerated by the buyer, benefits another economic category. In reality, the cost of the food that the urban worker consumes is expensive in comparison with their low salaries; it is cheap for those who employ their labor. What is missing in the payment made to peasants for the products produced by their labor in fact surfaces as a form of cheap labor in the accounting and profits of national and multinational businesses. When peasants buy something produced by industry - fertilizer, insecticides, clothes, shoes, or medicines - they pay a great deal in comparison with what they earn. When they sell their products, which will be consumed in the city, they can only sell them cheaply in comparison to the profits made by large industry, which can take advantage of the lowered costs of the labor force. What we observe is a clear transference of income from small farms, which produce most of our foods, to large capital....

Accumulation and Degradation

48. Those who do not manage to resist the various pressures and assaults cannot continue as settlers, sharecroppers, renters, inhabitants; thus, they become proletarians, workers looking for work not only in the countryside but also in the city.

49. The situation of laborers in the Amazon territory is even worse. They are landless workers, recruited when they are hooked up to a labor contractor in Goaias, in the the Northeast, and even in Sao Paulo, and then sold to contractors like an item of merchandise.... 51. The fact that peasants are sold is justified on the grounds of the debts they must contract for food and transportation on their way to the job. The debt is transferred from the one who first hooked them to the contractor, who uses that debt to enslave the worker as needed. The police, storeowners, and the owners of boarding houses in the towns of the sertao [arid interior of northern Brazil] are almost always involved in this trafficking in human beings. When the worker tries to flee, he is almost always punished or murdered, with the excuse that, in principle, he is a thief; he is trying to run off with something that now belongs to the one who contracted him: his labor power....

Doctrinal Foundation: The Land Is God's Gift for All People

56. In this doctrinal section, in which we seek to discover criteria so as to discern our pastoral options starting from the situation described above, our intention obviously is not to elaborate an exhaustive treatise on the whole of the biblical and doctrinal message of the Christian tradition, which the Church has received, enriched, and faithfully preserved for us. We only want to recall some themes and draw out some ideas that can help us understand the problem of the possession and use of the land within a vision that is Christian, socially just, and more family-spirited....

61. As Creator, the Lord God has the power to define the use and destiny of the land. From the beginning, God has entrusted it to human beings so that they can subject it and draw their sustenance from it (cf. Gn 1:23 - 30)....

65. The whole New Testament, the new alliance of God with his children, Jesus' brothers and sisters, guides us toward participation and the practice of justice in the distribution of material goods, as a necessary condition for the brotherhood and sisterhood of children of the same Father, in accordance with the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount (cf. Mt 5:7)....

68. In working out its teaching today, the Church seeks to learn from the experience of the saintly fathers, who tried to translate the lessons of Sacred Scripture for their societies.

69. "It was greed that distributed the rights to ownership that people claimed were theirs.... The earth was given to all, not just to the rich" (St. Ambrose).

70. "It was through positive law that property distinctions and the system of servitude were set up. Nevertheless, through natural law what prevailed was ownership common to all and the same freedom for all" (Gratian). This text is especially eloquent since it links individual appropriation to the system of servitude. Due to selfishness, the strong take for themselves not only things but persons, those who are weakest.

71. Saint Thomas tends to regard individual property as one of the ways whereby goods reach their social destiny of serving all. That is what he brings out with greater precision in this text: "With regard to the faculty of administering and directing, it is licit that human beings possess things as their own; with regard to use, human beings should not have external things as their own, but in common, that is, so as to share them with others."...

74. Pius XII also says, "Capital rushes in to take over land... which then becomes no longer something loved but something for cold speculation."

75. [The] "overall supply of goods is assigned, first of all, that all men may lead a decent life" (John XXIII, MM, 119)....

77. Paul VI insists on the principle that "private property does not constitute for anyone an absolute and unconditioned right" (PP, 23)....

79. John Paul II says, "There is a social mortgage on all private property."

80. A mortgage is a guarantee that obligations taken on will be fulfilled. From what the Holy Father says, it can be concluded that all private property is to some extent impounded, committed to its social destiny....

Land for Exploitation and Land for Work

82. A great number of our rural workers have this message of God vividly in their minds. The settlers express it when they struggle for the "possession and use" of the land, rather than for its "ownership." Property, in many cases, is represented by large ranchers and the big agricultural and agroindustrial companies. They "wheel and deal with the land" that God has entrusted to all human beings.

83. This mindset of the people alerts us to the distinction between two ways of appropriating the land, which deserve our attention: land for exploitation, which our peasants call land as a business; and land for work. Nevertheless, this distinction does not ignore the existence of land as productive, rural property that respects the right of workers, in accordance with the demands of the Church's social teaching.

84. Land for exploitation is land that capital appropriates so it may continue to grow, so as to constantly generate new and ever-greater profits. Such profit may derive either from the work of those who have lost their land and means of work, or from those who never had access to it, or from speculation that enables some to get rich at the cost of the whole society.

85. Land for work is land held by the one who works it. It is not land for exploiting others nor for speculating. In our country, the notion of land to be worked is strongly present in the people's law or right to family, tribal, and community property and in the right to "possession" [cf. next paragraph]. These forms of property, which are alternatives to capitalist exploitation, clearly open a broad avenue that makes viable a community way of working, even in extensive areas, and the utilization of adequate technology that will not require the exploitation of other people's labor.

86. In our country, two kinds of property systems stand in sharp opposition: on the one hand, the system that makes matters conflictive for peasants and rural workers, which is capitalist property; on the other hand, the alternative property systems mentioned above, which are being destroyed or mutilated by capital: family property, such as that of small farmers in the south and elsewhere; "possession," in which land is regarded as the property of all and the fruits go to the family working it - a system spread throughout country, especially in what is called the Amazon territory; and tribal and community property of the indigenous peoples and some rural communities.... 91. "Land is a gift from God." It is a natural good that belongs to everyone and not the result of work. However, it is work, more than anything else, that legitimizes the possession of land. That is how the settlers understand things when they claim the right to take possession of lands that are free, unoccupied, or unworked, since it is their understanding that land is a common patrimony and, as long as they are working it, they cannot be expelled.

92. Finally, we should not forget land on which to live, an especially distressing problem on the outskirts of cities, where families are forced to live in inhumane conditions of overcrowding and insecurity, and from which they are often expelled, even violently, to serve the interests of real estate companies or to expand the cities.

93. Such expulsions from housing land is all the more unjust and inhumane since these families are left utterly helpless and abandoned.

Our Pastoral Commitment

94. God continues to watch over the people.... And God challenges us: How can we bring it about that the earth may belong to all? How can we assure that the dignity of the human person be respected? How can we bring it about that Brazilian society overcome institutionalized injustice and reject political options opposed to the gospel? We believe the challenges here formulated are positive. However, we are aware that without concrete actions to respond to these challenges, the Church will not be a sign of God's love for human beings. Hence: 95. (1) As a first gesture, we want to place the problem of the possession and use of the Church's property under scrutiny and reexamine constantly its pastoral and social purpose, avoiding speculation in real estate and respecting the rights of those who work on the land. 96. (2) We commit ourselves to denounce patently unjust situations and the violence perpetrated in the areas of our dioceses and prelatures and to combat the causes that produce such injustices and violence, in fidelity to the Puebla commitments (see Puebla, 1160).

97. (3) We reaffirm our support for the just initiatives and organizations of workers, placing our energies and our means at the service of their cause, in conformity with those same commitments (see Puebla, 1162). Without replacing the people's initiatives, our pastoral activity will stimulate conscious and critical participation by workers in unions, associations, and commissions, as well as other kinds of cooperation, so that their organizations may be really independent and free, defending the interests and coordinating the demands of their members and their whole class.

98. (4) We support the efforts of rural people for a genuine Agrarian Reform, which we have already defined on several occasions, one that will permit access to land and conditions that favor working it. In order to make such agrarian reform effective, we want to esteem, defend, and promote property systems based on family, "possession," the tribal property of native peoples, and community property in which land is regarded as an instrument of work. We also support the organizing efforts of workers to demand the application and/or or reformulation of existing laws as well as to achieve agrarian, labor, and social security policies in accordance with the aspirations of the population. We also support the creation of Yanomami Park, in the form that avoids a reduction or fragmentation of that tribal land, and we insist that it is urgent that the remaining indigenous reserves be surveyed and marked off, including those in the border regions of our country....

102. (7) We renew our commitment to deepen the way the gospel is lived within our church communities, both rural and urban, as an effective way for the Church to contribute to the cause of the workers - for we are convinced of its transforming power.

103. As we take on a serious commitment to the workers, we need to nourish their courage and our own, their hope and our own, especially in moments of hardship and persecution. Thus, continually reencouraged by the recollection of the promise and certainty of the liberation brought by the Lord, lived in community, and celebrated in the mystery of the Eucharist, Christians will carry out their mission of being leaven, salt, and light in the midst of their working brothers and sisters.

104. In this manner, the Church will contribute to building up the new human being, the basis for a new society.

Conclusion

105. We are making this statement today precisely when agriculture is being called on to accept the serious responsibility of meeting the demands for alternate energy sources and for increasing our exports.

106. We fear that the discharging of these tasks will serve as a new pretext for trampling on the rights of those humble people in whose defense we are committing ourselves as pastors. This concern is not imaginary. Today, among the kinds of neocolonialism denounced by John Paul II, there looms the way the international economy is organized so as to assign to Brazil and other underdeveloped nations the role of providing foods and agriculturally derived raw materials for the nations that control that economy. In this context, overall capital-intensive strategies would reinforce the Brazilian economy's dependent condition and would tend to accelerate the process of proletarization of our rural people.

107. It is our understanding that the issues facing rural and urban workers and the issues around land will be truly solved only if there is a change in both the attitude and structure within which our society functions. As long as the politicoeconomic system favors the profit of a small number of capitalists, and the educational model is an instrument for maintaining this system, even by discouraging rural life and its values, there will be no true solution for the situation of injustice and the exploitation of the labor of the majority. 108. However, we recognize that the experience and creativity of our people who work the land can indicate new directions for taking advantage of alternative technologies and new community and cooperative ways of using the instruments of work.

109. This society will be built up through the efforts of all, through the utterly essential participation of young people, through the unity and organization of the weak - those for whom the world has contempt and whom God has chosen to confound and judge the powerful (cf. 1 Cor 1:26ff).

110. Finally, we express our special support and encouragement to all those community leaders, pastoral agents, and members of church bodies and groups that in recent years have been working in pastoral work concerning land, indigenous pastoral work, working-class pastoral work, and other kinds of pastoral work with the outcast. We also join our work to that of other Christian Churches, who are united by the same ideal.

111. We pray the Lord to enlighten us and to give us strength and courage to put into practice the commitments we are making.

Itaici
February 22 - 28, 1980