MST CPI carries out due diligence and visits another group’s invasion – 05/29/2023 – Politics

The first diligence of the members of the MST’s CPI was carried out this Monday (29) in the region of Pontal do Paranapanema, west of São Paulo, with visits to camps that do not belong to the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra).

A delegation made up of eight federal deputies, including the chairman of the commission Lieutenant-Colonel Zucco (Republicanos-RS) and the rapporteur Ricardo Salles (PL-SP), visited areas that were invaded at the beginning of the year by the FNL (Frente Nacional de Luta Campo and City).

The entity, which has José Rainha Júnior as one of its main leaders, was responsible for a series of invasions in the region in an initiative that became known as the Red Carnival.

José Rainha was arrested in March on charges of trying to extort landowners. At the time, the FNL denied the accusations and classified the arrest as “political in nature.”

The command of the MST’s CPI states that, because the entity does not have its own CNPJ, any complaints about invasions of private properties can be included in the scope of the commission’s investigation.

The entourage of deputies landed in Presidente Prudente (555 km from São Paulo) this Monday morning and had as their first agenda a meeting with members of the Judiciary Police Department of São Paulo Interior.

The meeting started around 8 am and lasted about two hours. Delegates Walmir Geralde and Ramon Euclides Guarnieri Pedrão, responsible for investigating recent invasions in the region, were heard. Deputies also gathered testimonials from rural producers who had their lands invaded.

“The information they gathered here today is from the victims already heard in the police investigations. So, in fact, they repeated what they said there, the crimes they suffered from extortion, invasion and everything else,” said lawyer Coraldino Vendramini, representative of the UDR (Ruralist Democratic Union) that accompanied the meeting.

Afterwards, the deputies went to an FNL camp erected at Fazenda Santa Mônica, located in the Rosana district, in the city of Primavera (735 km from the capital). Afterwards, the delegation visited camps in the municipalities of Teodoro Sampaio and Sandovalina.

Rapporteur of the CPI of the MST, deputy Ricardo Salles said that Fazenda Santa Mônica was a productive property before the invasion. And he classified the area as abandoned and with few farmers living in the camps.

“They transformed this work shed into a center for ideological indoctrination. This has nothing to do with access to land, with agricultural production, with family farming,” he said.

In a video posted on a social network, congresswoman Carol de Toni (PL-SC) compared the camps to “indoctrination and psychological manipulation centers”. And she showed images of a shed with flags and posters with speeches by Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara and Vladimir Lenin, calling them terrorists.

In the same place, deputy Rodolfo Nogueira (PL-MS) criticized land invasions, defended the right to property and called the shed in the landless settlement a “devil’s church”.

The only government deputy present in the delegation, Nilto Tatto (PT-SP) even suggested a visit to José Rainha Júnior at the Provisional Detention Center in the city of Caiuá, but the suggestion was not accepted.

A Sheet Tatto criticized the visits to the camps in the interior of São Paulo, said that the CPI has no defined focus and classified the actions as an attempt to criminalize the movements for the struggle for agrarian reform.

“It is a CPI to work against agrarian reform. And the interesting thing is that it takes the first step in a region where agrarian reform has contributed to the development of the region”, he said.

The PT deputy also said that the region is the target of invasions of public lands by large landowners. And he accused the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans), of working to legalize the public lands that were invaded and that should be destined for agrarian reform.

In a note, the MST classified the CPI as “an attempt to persecute and criminalize the popular struggle” and defended the fulfillment of the social function of the land provided for in the Constitution.

“Wanting to criminalize our struggle through a CPI is a strategy to omit the real problems and contradictions of the agribusiness production model in the Brazilian countryside, such as increasing deforestation, land grabbing, fires, violence in the countryside, use of labor analogous to slavery, destruction and contamination of natural resources by the use of pesticides”, he informed.

The CPI that investigates the actions of the MST was installed on May 17 in a session marked by attacks on the movement and the exchange of accusations between ruralist and government parliamentarians.

In a setback already expected by the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) government, the commission’s main posts were in the hands of representatives of the agribusiness bench and linked to the opposition.