João Paulo Rodrigues, from the MST, demands the soul of the Lula administration – 01/26/2024 – Power

When he was ten years old, João Paulo Rodrigues completed his first mission with the MST (Landless Rural Workers Movement).

In 1990, it was up to him and a cousin of the same age to run 5 km, swim across a stream, reunite families evicted from a camp in Pontal do Paranapanema and pass on instructions from the MST leadership about where they should go — the agents tried to disperse them and told them that they should return to their hometowns.

Now 44 years old, Rodrigues is the main leader of the second generation of the MST, the first to have been raised in settlements. The predecessors who founded the MST in 1984, in Cascavel (497 km from Curitiba), were formed in religious groups, unions and other rural movements.

In the MST, which turns 40 this January, he has held leadership roles since he was a teenager and is currently responsible for political articulation. Among representatives of social movements, he is one of the closest to President Lula (PT).

This combination of factors led him to occupy the position of popular mobilization coordinator for Lula’s campaign in 2022, when he was in charge of developing strategies to disseminate the PT member’s name beyond the framework of official communication.

Today, tell Sheet, MST and Lula are further away. Contrary to expectations, the president has not yet received the movement and has not visited settlements.

The peasant leader states that the movement needs to be aware that it is not in the government, despite supporting it. At the same time, he says, the president also has to understand the demonstrations by the landless, who classify 2023 as the worst year in terms of the number of settlements in four decades. And he also has to understand the protests and invasions (called occupations by the landless).

Rodrigues defines himself as a farmer. As a second-generation member of the MST, he was encouraged to study and holds agricultural technician and social science degrees.

Every 20 days, he leaves for his land in the Gleba 15 de Novembro settlement, in the far west of São Paulo, to “touch the farm”. The rest of the time, he stays in the capital or travels to MST activities.

“There’s duck, goose, guinea fowl, peacock, fish, pig, horse. I specialize in raising sheep and pigs. And what gives me the most income is milk and cassava.”

The emergence of Gleba was a milestone in the agrarian dispute in the state. In 1984, then governor Franco Montoro (PMDB) expropriated an illegal area claimed by landless people in Pontal do Paranapanema, one of the epicenters of land conflicts in the country, and established it as the first settlement in São Paulo.

After two years camping, the Rodrigues family then settled. João Paulo is the son of Valmir Rodrigues Chaves, better known as Bill, a former coffee sharecropper in Paraná and a pioneer of the MST in the region.

At that time, he was formed politically in the movement and in coexistence with rising PT members – the PT emerged in 1980, four years before the landless movement.

“I saw Lula for the first time at that time, the [Luiz] Gushiken, the [José] Genoino, because they went to the house. At the age of eight, I had a relationship with all these political popes”, he recalls. He states that he participated in almost all the invasions in Pontal during this period. At the age of 16, he was already coordinating impact actions.

Rodrigues states that his youth in settlements gave him a privileged and dispassionate view of the landless experience. He says he vividly remembers the feeling of the tent canvas over him almost melting in the summer and dripping cold drops in the winter.

“There is no glamour. Our radicalized struggle is not an ideological component, it is a question of survival. When we occupied land, looted, closed highways, it was to solve the problem of my subsistence as a person who was carrying out agrarian reform. The political consciousness of that that was part of a larger role comes after the occupations”, he argues.

In the following years, Rodrigues would rise through the bureaucracy. In 2002, he interrupted his philosophy course at Universidade Metodista to coordinate the MST office in Brasília. On that occasion, he gained prominence by taking the lead in negotiations for the occupation of the family farm of then president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (PSDB), located in Buritis (MG).

He would still be responsible for the MST’s youth and international relations before being elevated to the position of political coordinator. In 2014, he completed a social sciences course at Uninove (Nove de Julho University), in São Paulo.

Rodrigues was already among the main leaders of the MST during the government of PT member Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016) when the movement promoted a split in its project.

Faced with disillusionment with the PT administrations, the MST diagnosed the failure of the battle for classic agrarian reform, based on an attempt at an alliance with the most progressive industrial sectors, and embraced a program of popular agrarian reform, based on agroecological development and confronting large estates. and transnational companies.

Rodrigues is one of the main enthusiasts of popular agrarian reform in the MST. He says that the next seven years, counting on a re-election of the PT, are the window of opportunity for the MST to propose an alternative agricultural model to agribusiness for the country. A “green revolution in the countryside”.

“At the MST bases there are 10 million hectares. If we manage to have seed agro-industries, bank partnerships in this production chain, and we manage to move forward in having all agro-industrialized and benefited production, we could be one of the largest food production organizations in the world” , says Rodrigues.

The idea is to produce without pesticides, with minimal participation of heavy machinery, in a cooperative model, and not just a family one. The MST currently has 185 cooperatives, and some of them produce the movement’s most massive productions, such as organic rice and milk.

A challenge for the MST is being able to dominate the entire chain of a product, from creation to marketing. In the case of milk, the estimate is that, of the 7 million liters that the movement produces per day, 6 million are delivered pure to the traditional industry, which then concentrates the profit.

In the grape juice chain, the movement is discussing the installation of a glass factory in Rio Grande do Sul to bottle 3 million liters per harvest, in addition to wine and jelly. The idea is to seek support from BNDES (National Development Bank).

More than his predecessors, Rodrigues has his own concern with the role of the MST in the cultural wars. It is in this sense that he defends the persistence of occupations. According to him, they and strikes are “twin sisters of radicality”, which peasants and workers resort to for their continuous novelty effect.

The occupations would then help in the tasks that the MST has to propose the debate on the right to land and keep alive the dream of the “socialist society”, of “planting the seed that we will be equal”, “without exploited and without explorer”, says Rodrigues.

It was in this field of “dispute of imaginaries” that the MST made a commitment to get closer to civil society, through actions such as food and blood donations, and by strengthening ties with LGBTQIA+, black and indigenous groups. It is the MST that sells thousands of t-shirts and caps per month.

“We have always denied in the history of the MST that it is an identitarian, ongue organization, flirting with middle sectors, etc. But the crisis of the classic movement, union, party, ‘forced’ us to have other channels with those who are talking to the people”, it says.

“We have not lost the brotherhood with CUT, PT, PDT, and we are looking for new actors who are fighting without any prejudice”, he adds. “To face an agro that is pop, we have to build a fight.”

In this aspect, the Lula government has failed, he assesses. In addition to not having registered significant advances in the programs – “I don’t think it’s reasonable that it hasn’t been signaled what model of labor reform we will have” –, the PT administration has not given space for popular participation and has not produced symbolism in dealing with of social policy, says Rodrigues.

“I really like the events that are held at Palácio do Planalto, but I don’t think it’s symbolic at all (…) I need Lula to be closer to popular activities so he can hear, feel and signal”, he says.

Rodrigues says that a minister told him that the government is doing well, “but without soul”, with which he agrees.

“I need to know where he is going so I can convince others. I can’t see it just from Lula internationally or just from the Treasury. I need this government to give us the elements to hold assemblies and discuss public policies in the camps or in small towns”, he concludes.