AGRARIAN
REFORM |
A few decades after Brazil's discovery, and following an initial phase characterized by trade with the Indians, the Portuguese instituted the system of hereditary land divisions (capitanias) and the king assigned them to selected recipients. Brazil was divided into 12 capitanias, and these immense tracts of land were bestowed upon men with ties to the Crown. Thus, from the very beginning, the Brazilian land structure was based upon large rural landholdings -- the latifúndios.
The circumstances of the world market and of the colonial relationships gave rise to the cultivation of a single product -- sugar cane -- which was developed by exploiting slave labor brought from Africa. This was the system that dominated Brazil's economy for three centuries: large tracts of land owned by the king's friends, slavery, and the cultivation of a single product for export.
In 1822, the independence of Brazil brought a brief period in which, for lack of legislation about land possession, free men occupied modest tracts of vacant land. The number of these squatters, however, was small and did not change the profile of the country's agrarian structure, which remained basically the monocultural latifúndio -- then based on coffee, which also exploited slave labor and was meant for export to the world market.
In 1850, with the so-called Land Law (Lei de Terras), the slave-owning elites closed access to farmlands, establishing that the occupation of public lands would be permitted only upon the payment of large sums of money. The new legislation impeded access to the land for poor whites, mulattos, blacks and European immigrants who were beginning to arrive in Brazil.
1.2 Surplus Labor and Immigrants
The end of the slave trade in Brazil in 1851 sparked an appreciable influx of European immigrants. The Brazilian oligarchies needed a new source of cheap labor to replace the slaves on the coffee plantations in the southeast. The Europeans who had arrived in the south of Brazil a few decades earlier had fared better. At that time, the Brazilian crown needed to populate the territory along the southern frontier. This area was sparsely populated and was threatened constantly by invasions from neighboring countries. It had even declared independence from Brazil during a revolution that lasted ten years (1835-45), but the separatists were defeated.
In the south, the European immigrants received modest plots of land and most of them prospered. This is one of the colonization factors that explains why the state of Rio Grande do Sul has a more balanced ownership and use of land than other states: it has almost no unproductive latifúndios and few land title disputes.
The arrival of the European immigrants did more than resolve the problems of territorial occupation in the south and the shortage of cheap labor for the large landowners of the southeast. It was part of the solution for Europe's excess labor force. The modernization of the means of production in the 19th century left large numbers of European workers without employment. The labor market, ceasing to be craft-based and labor intensive, became mechanized. The poor and the rural landless peasants in the continent's most undeveloped regions joined those who had no place in Europe's urban labor market.
Excluded from the process of economic development and turned out by modernization, these European masses were left with no other alternative but to abandon their countries in search of a better life in the new world of the Americas -- principally, Brazil, the United States and Argentina -- in Australia and in some African countries. Thus, they spread throughout the three corners of the earth -- Asia being the only continent to which they did not go. This exportation of the poor was in part responsible for the eradication of poverty in Europe during the 19th century.
During a period of only 61 years -- 1884-1945 -- Brazil received nearly 4 million European immigrants, particularly Germans, Italians, Spanish and Portuguese (see the following table). In addition to these, more than 100,000 Russians and almost 200,000 Japanese came to Brazil. During this same period, more than 500,000 immigrants, representing various other nationalities (Polish, Austrians, Greeks, Armenians, Dutch, Swiss, Hungarians, as well as Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians and Palestinians), chose to live in Brazil.
The world has changed. Today, no country can opt to resolve the problem of its excess urban and rural workers in this way. There are no more vacancies left anywhere on the planet. To the contrary, technological progress, globalization, the opening of markets, and competition have led to a new increase in the number of workers excluded from the productive system. At the same time, immigration barriers are rising everywhere. Each country will have to resolve, internally, its own problems of unemployment and poverty.
Through a historic irony, many of the leaders and participants in today's organized movements of landless workers in Brazil are descendants of those poor European farmers who immigrated here in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. The blue eyes, the light skin, and the Italian, German, Polish and Spanish surnames leave no room for doubt. They are, in fact, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those whom Europe excluded in the last century, and they are now struggling in Brazil against being excluded again at the end of the 20th century.