“I was born in Redentor near Tenente Portela in the north of Rio Grande do Sul state. My father farmed a small plot of land. I was only two and a half when my mother died in childbirth. My father married again after a year. When one of my elder sisters was 21 years old, she married and I went to live with her in a nearby town. I looked after the house, washed the clothes, made bread and looked after my nephew. And soon there was another child too. I went on studying for a while, but it wasn’t easy. My sister and her husband didn’t have their own land so they had to rent. They had to give half of their produce to the landowner. Money got so short that we had to buy food on credit in the local shop. After harvest, we had to pay our debts. I remember one year we wanted to buy a chair for the house, but there wasn’t enough money left for that. The next year it was even worse. My brother-in-law had to sell some of his dairy cows to cover the debts.
“It was 1986, right at the beginning, that the MST arrived in the region. I was only 14 or 15 at the time. We were living close by an MST settlement. We saw the way the families progressed. They lived in black plastic tents when they arrived, but soon they had built proper houses, bought furniture, got electricity. We’d been there all those years and we hadn’t even got electricity! At first, my brother-in-law got angry. He said, ‘Here we are, killing ourselves with work and paying all that rent. And these vagabonds come in and get all this help from the government.’
“But after a while, we started making friends with them. They joined our church. They were active in the trade union. We were still very poor. We never had any money for clothes, for anything. So my brother-in-law decided to join the MST. Three months later I joined them. I was 16 or 17 years old at the time and I loved the camp. It was a wonderful communal experience. We all shared everything. I was in the liturgy commission and I traveled all over the state. I lost my shyness.
“But the owner of the estate got an eviction order from the courts and we all had to leave. Eventually, on March 9, 1989, we occupied the Santa Elmira ranch in the northwest of the state. The landowner was very angry. He got his gunmen together and launched an attack. First of all, his planes sprayed tear gas on the camp. And then the gunmen tried to take all the children away from their mothers. They’d brought a bus to take them to a home. The mothers screamed and wouldn’t let go of their children. The men grabbed people by the hair, the clothes, anything. By chance, I wasn’t there that day. My sister had gone to town to have another baby and I was with her. But I heard all about it.
“Then they took all the men away. They made them lie down, they beat them, they trampled on them. A lot of them had ribs broken. They accused the men with beards of being priests, the bigger men of being leaders. They put revolvers in their mouths and knives under their nails. They stripped off their clothes and put them on anthills. There was a priest there—Frei Sérgio Gorgen. They broke his teeth with a blow to his mouth. And then they arrested 30 men, including Frei Sérgio. On the way to prison in the town of Sobradinho, they pulled them all out of the police van and threatened to throw them into a gully. They treated the men like criminals in the jail, shaving their heads and beating them. There was huge uproar. Lots of mobilizations and marches. The state governor, Pedro Simon, had to back down. He had to free the men and give land to all the families that had been in Santa Elmira. It all happened quickly, in just two weeks. That’s how we got the land for our settlement, Conquista da Fronteira.”
—From Cutting the Wire: The Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil by Sue Branford and Jan Rocha.
