3.4.1 | Phases of Assentamento: Grassroot Engagement
As indicated above, one of MST’s central activities consists in engaging and mobilizing active participants, most of which come from extremely underprivileged backgrounds. This process of grassroots engagement represents the starting point for the creation of an assentamento. Given the particular history and present institutional configuration of Brazilian agrarian reform, MST has in practice become the key actor for identifying, gathering, and guiding individuals and their families in the long process that may lead them to become assentados. From the perspective of MST’s leadership, this role is based on the historically-derived conviction that “there are no rights without pressure” (Stedile, 1999, p. 43). The experience consistently reported not just by Brazilian agrarian reform activists is that the laws stipulating the expropriation and redistribution of unproductive land (explicit even in the Constitutional level) remain largely futile, unless pressure is exerted “from below” in such a way that the variety of state actors involved in a process of expropriation and redistribution are effectively led to counteract the influence of landowners and allied political elites (Comparato, 2001; Ondetti, 2008).
For MST, each potential expropriation of land becomes a specific initiative involving the collaboration of different thematic sectors within the movement’s organizational structure. The most important sector in this phase acts in the so-called “front for the masses”; as one interviewee described, their main focus is to engage
Meetings are frequently organized with the help of local clergy members, union leaders, or sympathetic politicians, and are held in churches, union halls, or community centers (Ondetti, 2008, p. 75). In such meetings, lists are passed to pre-register those who might be interested in joining occupations and encampments in the region. Although pre-registration is in principle open to everyone from the start, MST regional leaders usually emphasize that participation represents no guarantee of becoming an assentado, given the many obstacles and contingencies along a path that can take years and comprises many risks, including expulsion by the police [7:35].“families under precarious conditions [...] living on benches in squares, in favelas, sleeping on the streets, or in hostels, inviting those families and showing them a bit the rights they have to live with dignity” [7:26].
Interestingly, grassroots engagement is not centered on individuals but rather on families. This has been a historical tendency for MST, which may be explained, on the one hand, by the fact that families are less likely to be violently repressed or straightforwardly stigmatized as “criminals” (Ondetti, 2008, p. 49), but on the other hand, and perhaps most importantly, by the traditional relevance that the ‘family unit’ bears in Brazilian society. Interviewees consistently speak about families [famílias assentadas] when describing the histories and present configuration of their assentamentos [15:11, 19:04, 31:08], a reality that traces back to the very first moment in which MST mobilizes potential assentamento inhabitants. Governmental policy confirms and reinforces this point, as most policy instruments (including laws and public programs) are specifically framed to target families. As pointed out by Brazil’s Secretary of Family Agriculture, “the strongest unit tends to predominate for everyone, and that is the family unit for [agricultural] production” [36:22].
It is in the grassroots engagement phase that beliefs and expectations about a possible future life in an assentamento are discussed with future assentados for the first time and where common visions and identities start to be built. However, the core of these processes—which, as we will argue, strongly determine the collective dynamics of a future assentamento—occurs in the next phase of an assentamento’s history.
Listen how Mauro got engaged with MST.
>>> 3.4.2 | Phases of Assentamento: Occupation and Encampment