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$Title{Brazil
Chapter 2C.   Social Relations}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{P. A. Kluck}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{land
rural
even
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family
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}
$Date{1982}
$Log{}
Title:       Brazil
Book:        Brazil, A Country Study
Author:      P. A. Kluck
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1982

Chapter 2C.   Social Relations

Family and Kin

     Brazil's "cult of the family" stands out even among the family-oriented
nations of Latin America. Historically, the family has been perhaps the single
most important institution in the formation of Brazilian society. The ideal is
defined in terms of the traditional kin relations of upper class families; it
hardly serves to describe urban middle-class families and, still less, those
of the lower class. Nonetheless, it remains a cultural ideal reflected in the
ways Brazilians conceptualize and evaluate a whole range of personal and
social relations.

     The traditional upper class family was characteristically patriarachal-
"taciturn father, submissive mother, and cowed children," is one historian's
commentary. The Luso-Brazilians took from Portugal the practice of secluding
women, and travelers to Brazil until the late nineteenth century commented on
the "Arabic" sequestering of upper class women. The customary treatment of
women in the colonial era was apparently too extreme even for those whose view
of that sex was conditioned by the Pauline epistles. The bishop of Bahia
complained that some parents were reluctant to let their daughters leave home
even to attend Mass. The ideal, according to a common proverb, was for a woman
to leave home for her baptism, marriage, and funeral. Indeed, a woman's
position was an unenviable one; again, numerous travelers commented on it, and
many attributed it to the customary presence of slaves. "Surrounded by slaves,
the Brazilian is accustomed to see only slaves among the beings over whom he
has superiority. The woman is, frequently, the first slave of the household,
the dog the last."

     The most significant kin group was (and still is for many upper class
families) the parentela, a diffuse group comprising the relatives an
individual recognizes from both families. Kinship terms, such as cousin, aunt,
and uncle, are applied to a whole range of kin, and the extent of an
individual's parentela is limited only by genealogical memory and willingness
to recognize distant relatives. Parentelas may include hundreds of
individuals; typically the kin group focuses less on strict rules of descent
than its relationship to an illustrious ancestor. Large parentelas continue to
be a force in social life. There is a constant round of family-centered
events, including baptisms, weddings, and funerals. The upper class Brazilian
often maintains social contact with kin numbering in the hundreds (see
Conservative Groups, ch. 4).

     The parentelas often held resources together, and even today there is a
strong family presence in many corporations. Rural politics until the 1960s
was simply unintelligible without taking into account the web of interlocking
parentelas at every level of political organization. The parentela almost
overshadowed the nuclear family in the raising of children. Most of a child's
early years might be spent in the company of divers cousins, uncles, aunts,
and grandparents. The parentela was, in a sense, a social universe. Parentelas
were linked by marriage as well as blood; marriages between cousins were not
uncommon and gave both families the advantage of a "known quantity" in their
offspring's spouse. Young women normally experienced little social contact
with any males but their relatives. Their kin were therefore ideal marriage
partners in that they were considered to be trustworthy individuals. One
author tells of an argument between her parents (then married some 20 years)
in which her mother replied to her father's criticisms with the remark, "What
right do you have to say things like that to me? You're not even my
relative!"

     The parentela serves as an interest group. Lesser members not only bask
in the reflected glory of the prominent but also share, through sinecures
and the like, in their wealth and influence. Family loyalty is the
individual's highest duty; and failure to assist one's kin in their need
diminishes one's stature in the same way that inability to protect one's
clients or dependents diminishes a patron. Nepotism (filhotismo), far from
being dereliction of duty, is the influential family member's first
obligation.

     Godparenthood (compadrio) both extended and reinforced the web of
kinship. A godparent might be a child's relative-an uncle, an aunt, even an
older sibling, or an outsider. The relationship could function to
strengthen a preexisting one between relatives or to bring other parentelas
into a pseudo-kinship relationship. Kinship served as an idiom for defining
social relations in general. Compadrio obligations involved not only the child
and his or her godparents but also the godparents and the parents themselves.
Godparents, parents, and children owed each other assistance, trust, and
mutual support. Compadrio could be used to deepen a patron-client
relationship; lower class Brazilians could thereby emphasize their loyalty
and respect for an influential patron. Compadrio was so pervasive an element
of social relations, notes one anthropologist, that compadrismo is "synonymous
with political protection." Further, in many parts of the country a child
receives godparents not only at baptism but also at confirmation and marriage.

     Kinship functions very differently for the lower orders; the every
existence of a parentela demands wealth and influence in some degree. Larger
extended kin groups atrophied among lower class Brazilians in part because
of the lack of resources and in part because of the sheer mobility of the
populace (see Migration, this ch.). Distance weakens kin ties and
responsibilities, even as deeply held an obligation as a son's duty to care
for his parents in their old age. Within the constraints of migration and
wealth, kin do aid and assist one another. There is a tendency for rural
neighborhoods of small farmers to be composed of a group of interrelated
families. Even on plantations where the population is more mobile, the
tendency is for kin to migrate to the same locale and live near one another.
Something on the order of half of a plantation population might be expected
to have kin on the same fazenda or living nearby.

     The obligations that extended kin owe one another are not particularly
well defined among the general population. Married siblings living near one
another may, if they are so inclined, engage in a variety of mutual aid
arrangements; the arrangements themselves, however, are frequently the same
that non-kin make. Likewise, kin can also make agreements that reflect nothing
but market forces, as when an uncle hires his nephew for a day's work or
brothers agree to sell merchandise to one another at the going rate. Joint
economic ventures are relatively rare; married siblings, their spouses, and
children would be unlikely to farm together, for example. There are instances,
particularly in the South, where separate households will specialize in the
various aspects of a business. One brother might do all of the marketing for
his sibling's farms, or siblings might agree to sell all their dairy products
to their brother who owns a bakery in town.

     Within the individual household, rights and duties are more clearly
stipulated. A husband owes his wife and children protection and sustenance;
they owe him deference and obedience. Children should care for their parents
in their old age. Ideally, parents should see their children started in life;
this assistance can take many forms, such as education, land, or money to
begin a business. The norms frequently go by the board with the exigencies
poorer Brazilians face. Partible inheritance is a legal requirement, but where
family relations are not acrimonious, heirs accept their "grubstake" as their
patrimony or sell their shares for a pittance to the sibling who cared for the
parents in their declining years.

     The nuclear family is the typical household unit. In most of the country
the ideal is for a married couple to set up housekeeping as soon as possible.
In the rural South, however, a three-generation household is not uncommon.
It is an arrangement that demands considerable flexibility on the part of all
concerned, but it affords the farm couple real advantages when children are
young and the family's labor is limited.

     There are three principal kinds of marriage: civil, religious, and
common law (amasiado). Only civil marriage is recognized by the state and
confers legal status on the marriage. It ensures the family social security
benefits and the children a portion of the inheritance, establishes the legal
responsibility of both parties in regard to each other and to their children,
and determines certain property rights as agreed to by the spouses.

     Divorce has been legal since 1977; before that time legal separation,
a variety of quasi-legal contractual unions, and foreign divorce and
remarriage were the principal means whereby middle- and upper class Brazilians
regularized marital status. Legalized divorce will presumably have little
impact on most of those living in common-law unions because they lack the
financial resources to take advantage of this option.

Rural Society

     Social relations in the countryside are based on the simple fact that
relatively few have secure access to land; the roots of contemporary rural
society lie in plantation agriculture geared to export crop production, which
relied on slave labor. The recipients of crown land grants (sesmarias) were
the powerful and the influential. Although care was supposedly taken that only
those who could exploit the land grants productively received sesmarisas,
there was in fact no effective curb on the accumulation of land by a powerful
few.

     The pattern of land use was extensive: plantation owners (fazendeiros)
increased their wealth by bringing more land under cultivation-not by using
more intensively the land they already had. The history of agriculture is one
of periodic frontier expansion. The push toward new agricultural lands came
not only through soil exhaustion or demographic pressures but also through
changing world demand: Brazil had its sugar, cotton, cacao, coffee, and
rubber frontiers. More recently changes in tax incentives, as well as
expanding domestic markets, have fueled a new burst of western and northern
migration and settlement (see Cultural Regions, this ch.).

     Small landholders typically spearheaded the march toward the frontier.
Pushed off more desirable land by plantation owners, they chose more remote
regions by default. As settlement increased and hitherto remote regions caught
the interest of the powerful, earlier settlers were shunted farther toward
the frontier or incorporated into the plantation work force. The powerful
resorted to a variety of strategems to expel squatters. Typically, a
potential fazendeiro laying claim to a stretch of land would hire a gang of
thugs (capangas) to pursue a claim. Armed retainers were virtually essential
to the potential landowner; other aspirants would have their own capangas
and squatters were often armed and, even if expelled, might be inclined to
seek revenge before moving onward. Violence was endemic on the frontier. The
murder rate in one municipality on the coffee frontier in the early days of
settlement, to take but one example, was more than five times that of more
settled rural areas.

     Clouded land titles contributed much to the uncertainty of land tenure.
Even in Rio Grande do Sul, a region spared much of the frenzied land
speculation of the coffee, sugar, and cacao regions and where small
landholders were relatively immune from pressures from fazendeiros, there
was chronic confusion over landholding. In the early 1900s a land commission
for the state found that roughly 10 percent of all titles were clouded. In
more favored areas the level of land speculation and the sheer velocity of
land transactions exacerbated the chaos surrounding landholding. Concessions
were granted and canceled; forging land titles was a minor industry.
Speculators frequently knew that their land was occupied but simply counted
on reselling it and letting the unfortunate third party deal with the previous
occupants.

     As titles became more regularized, a local oligarchy of landed and
influential families emerged. In rural areas the contemporary social spectrum
of old settlements is diverse. At the upper end are large landholders, rural
industrialists (such as sugar mill owners), commercial elites, and upper
ranking local governmental officials. Small- to mid-sized proprietors,
marketing middlemen, and shopkeepers represent a middle echelon, slightly more
prosperous and secure than sharecroppers, tenants, artisans, and craftsmen. At
the bottom are a growing number of day laborers.

Large Landholders

     In Brazil fewer than 2,000 agricultural establishments (of more than 5
million total) control nearly 15 percent of the land. Less than 1 percent
of all holdings (with more than 1,000 hectares) are on over 40 percent of the
land, while more than half (with less than 10 hectares) are on less than 3
percent of all land.

     Landholdings are concentrated in every region, but especially in the
North and the Center-West where establishments of more than 10,000 hectares
comprise roughly one-third of all holdings. Both regions, ironically, are the
latest Brazilian frontier-areas seen as a "safety valve" for absorbing
land-hungry peasants from the Northeast.

     The figures, if anything, slightly understate the extent of land
concentration. Large landholders can partially insulate themselves against the
pressures of land fragmentation through inheritance. Extended families operate
their holdings as a single unit while registering them as several farms for
inheritance or tax purposes. By the 1970s, in any event, the extent to which
large holdings were held by corporations and financial institutions rather
than individual families blunted the impetus for dividing large holdings.

     The fazendeiro was traditionally the pivot of social relations in the
countryside. On the estate a fazendeiro's authority was virtually absolute.
Abolition of slavery altered hegemony not a whit; the authority of the
fazendeiro was largely unchallenged until the 1950s and 1960s. Individual
fazendeiros might have failed to uphold the cultural norms and to wield their
authority well or astutely, but the plantation authority structure persisted.
The locality was dominated by a few landed families. Political life was
characterized by coronelismo, the Brazilian form of bossism wherein a
fazendeiro exchanged the votes of loyal retainers for political plums (see
Politics under the First Republic, ch. 1). Relations among the landed
families were frequently antagonistic; the internecine fighting of local
landed clans was a mainstay of literature from every region of the country.
Even in the smallest of districts feuding was a chronic feature of social
life; land, albeit concentrated, was never so much so that it precluded the
formation of factions. As settlements aged, landholding became more
regularized, and the violent disputes of years earlier gave rise to political
jockeying. Local-level political activity normally reflected the personal and
family loyalties of the participants more than ideological differences;
splits within the local elite were often the results of feuds begun
generations past rather than contemporary socioeconomic differences.

     Paternalism was the ideal principle dictating dealings between the
fazendeiro and his dependents; they included not just family but all the
plantation's sharecroppers and tenants. They owed the fazendeiro respect and
unswerving loyalty; there continues to be an elaborate etiquette whereby the
lower orders address their superiors in rural Brazil, and deference is
particularly due the fazendeiro. In return the landowner is to act as patron
and protector to those who depend on his or her beneficence. It is hard
to overestimate the extent to which the forms of deference remain ingrained
in peasant behavior. Even so radical a force as the peasant leagues were not
immune. One of the earliest leagues began by asking a fazendeiro to be its
honorary president.

     When practice approached the ideal, paternalism could do much to blunt
the inequity of economic elations and alleviate the uncertainty that was the
peasant's lot. "At its highest level," notes one author, "it is a form of
unwritten social security that works well." The ideal patron not only
guarantees sharecroppers and tenants access to land but also provides loans
before harvest (when they are most hard pressed) and credit in the fazenda
store. The fazendeiro should care for the health and well-being of the
plantation workers. Influence in local politics should ensure that one's
loyal retainers have hospital care if they are in need of it. Traditionally,
the effective patron was able to preserve the fazenda from any and all outside
interference so that not even the police could harrass workers under the
protection of the fazendeiro. If the labor demands made of sharecroppers and
tenants were onerous, a patron could selectively dispense with the worst
conditions for favored workers. In its essence paternalism made it clear that
the worker's well-being was not a right but a matter of noblesse oblige.

     Still there was a certain pressure on landholders to follow the canons of
good paternalistic behavior. It was the horde of loyal retainers and
dependents that validated the landholder's status as much as the land itself
did. Indeed, it was unfeasible to occupy land without numbers of sharecroppers
scattered about to secure the perimeter of the estate. It was the ability to
dispense favors that ensured the landholder the forms of deference within the
community.

     In regions without a history of export crop production or with a limited
labor force, the harsher aspects of landlord-tenant relations were blunted
still further. Where one could lose a labor force, i.e., where peasants could
seek a better situation, fazendeiros were normally careful to avoid acquiring
a reputation for bad faith or niggardliness. Where there was no ready
financial advantage in converting forestland to cultivation (and before
landholders feared enforcement of legislation guaranteeing squatters' rights),
a fazendeiro might demand little or nothing of those living on land he or she
owned. Anthropologist Shirley describes a conversation with a fazendeiro in a
remote area of Sao Paulo in the late 1960s. The fazendeiro said he had some 30
families who did not pay rent living on forestland. Shirley asked if he had
tried to force them off. "Oh, no," was the fazendeiro's reply. "I've always
had as much land as I needed, and besides some of them are armed."

     Changes in the 1960s and 1970s often undermined the ties between patron
and dependent. New landlords often failed to conform to the paternalistic
model and eschewed personalistic ties with their tenants. Those purchasing
land were frequently successful businessmen, financiers, or simply
corporations and financial institutions. At the same time, legislation
governing the treatment of rural workers and the rights of squatters
encouraged landholders to limit their work forces and expel any squatters who
might have even a tenuous claim to land. Tax incentives as well favored less
labor-intensive agricultural products (see Agriculture, ch. 3).

     As a group, large landowners have always been highly diverse and in the
early 1980s there were no indications of impending change. They vary by
region, in their relationship to the market, and frequently in their ethnic
background. There are substantial differences in the scale of resources
landowners from various regions enjoy; even a wealthy fazendeiro from an
obscure municipality would probably be unable to afford a fraction of a prime
agricultural enterprise. The group includes old aristocratic families,
descendants of immigrants whose timely arrival and entrepreneurial skills
gave them a chance to make money in one of the periodic "boom" economic
cycles, and well-placed government administrators.

     Although landholding is concentrated, the pattern of frontier expansion
permits some mobility. Some squatters manage to register their holdings and
become part of the local landed elite; it requires a measure of good fortune
to acquire adequate cash and to have an extended family near at hand to
assist in defending holdings from outside incursions. Even the relatively
penurious might hope to open a store in the front of the farmhouse and extend
credit to form patron relationships with neighboring households. Shopkeeping
gives the ambitious peasant a potential power base. "Semi-peasants" can,
through commercial success, consolidate their landholdings, send their
children to secondary school or college, and attain a measure of local power
and influence.

Small and Mid-Sized Landholders

     The peasant proprietor has never had an easy row to hoe in Brazil, and
the 1970s had a less than positive impact on the situation. The ratio of
small farm owners to agricultural employees dropped from four to one in 1950
to three to two in 1975. Earnings among the bottom 50 percent of all farms
declined from nearly 25 percent of agricultural income to less than 15 percent
between 1970 and 1980. Small holdings are concentrated in Ceara, throughout
the agreste zone in the Northeast (a transitional region between the humid
coastal zone and the inland sertao), in eastern Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais, the
state of Rio de Janeiro, and in the hilly parts of Santa Catarina and Rio
Grande do Sul. Those who own properties of less than 10 hectares constitute
over one-third of all landowners. They represent more than three-quarters of
the notably less secure group that occupies land with no clear title.
Squatters and landowners with less than 10 hectares account for roughly 2
percent of all farmland. When authors comment on Brazil's land-hungry peasants
they mean just that: one anthropologist describes a Nordestino peasant who
built roughly a quarter-hectare plot in a mangroove swamp by packing mud dikes
against the tidal waters. He watered the plot by carrying gourds of fresh
water from the nearest well some five kilometers away.

     Smallholders have always existed in the shadow of plantations; they were
nonetheless essential to the domestic economy and the continued export of
agricultural commodities. Peasants were the primary supplies of foodstuffs for
the colony. Subsistence crops could never generate the income that export
crops could, so there was little enticement for fazendeiros to plant them.
Rising world prices for the export crop of the hour drove up food prices in
the cities and frequently spread hunger in the countryside. There were
repeated royal edicts requiring plantation owners to plant subsistence crops
for their slaves, all to little avail. "Sugar devours everything" was the
commonplace description of that crop's spread. The rise of coffee cultivation
had a similar impact. In one municipality in the Paraiba Valley, for example,
food prices more than quadrupled in less than a decade following the first
coffee exports. The region, long an exporter of foodstuffs, became an
importer.

     Family farms dotted the less favored agricultural regions. Most sold a
small surplus at local markets, though a few ventured far enough afield to
compete with middlemen in the larger cities. In the early nineteenth century
peasants were prohibited from selling at the better sites in Bahia. Peasants
in a given rural neighborhood often maintained a loose sort of allegiance to a
nearby fazendeiro who offered them patronage and protection in their dealings
with powerful outsiders. Descriptions of rural smallholders by
nineteenth-century travelers sound curiously similar to field studies of the
1950s and 1960s.

     Contemporary smallholders grow a variety of crops and often raise
livestock; they maintain a link to the market, selling their surplus while
ensuring the family's subsistence. Theirs is an existence that the urban
Brazilian judges to be hopelessly inferior. The inhabitants of even the most
undistinguished of towns in the interior would concur. There are a variety of
Portuguese terms denoting the peasantry; virtually all can be and frequently
are used derogatorily. A Portuguese dictionary defines one of the terms,
caipira, as a "man or woman who does not live in a settlement, who has no
education or social graces, and who does not know how to dress or present
himself in public." Indeed, urban florescence, associated as it was with the
expansion of plantation agriculture, almost always meant the demise of the
smallholders. The end of isolation and available land undermined the system of
family labor, mutual aid among neighbors, and leisure that was essential to
peasant culture.

     The rural neighborhood (bairro) is the basic nonfamily social unit. The
bairro, "a series of linked homesteads ... bound by feelings of locality, by
convenience, by practices of mutual aid, and by folk religious practices,"
commonly comprises a single small valley and shares a chapel and shop. In the
South, neighborhoods called linhas (literally, lines) stretch along the
principal means of transportation. Neighborhoods are frequently linked by
kinship and marriage. In contrast with the nearly nomadic plantation labor
force, bairros often have a stable core of families over several generations.
Neighboring households exchange mutual aid on a day-by-day basis; a group of
families exchanges meat among themselves when slaughtering a large animal and,
traditionally, gathers for a communal house raising.

     Peasant landowners and their fortunes vary from region to region. In the
agreste small farmers are hemmed in between the sugar plantations of the humid
coast and the cattle ranches of the sertao. They are a middle segment wedged
between the fortunate few large landholders and the mass of landless laborers.
There is considerable variation within the class of peasant landholders; not
only does the size of individual holdings vary but also sheer diversity in the
agreste contributes to wide differences in income and productivity. The ideal
is to possess a trade or skill, such as carpentry or mechanics, to supplement
agricultural earnings. Even plots that provide little more than the family's
subsistence are a safety net for those who face the uncertain market for wage
labor. Families try to raise a few head of livestock, ideally one or more head
of cattle and hogs, though the more marginal the holding the fewer the
livestock. Peasants also take advantage of opportunities for day labor on
nearby fazendas, and undertake an annual migration to the sugar zone to work
on plantations there.

     Agreste peasants (along with tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the
Northeast) were enthusiastic adherents of the peasant leagues. The leagues
began modestly enough as mutual aid societies and expanded as smallholders
were increasingly threatened by the expansion of plantations and changing
labor practices. By the early 1960s the leagues were calling for a radical
redistribution of land, and the agreste became a region of intense agrarian
unrest. The leagues were early targets of the military regime that seized
power in 1964.

     In the Southeast small peasant farms outside the coffee areas persisted
into the late 1960s. Like most smallholders, they were mixed agriculturists
selling a slight surplus over the family's sustenance. Poor transportation
limited their involvement in marketing. Even in the mid-1960s travel in rainy
weather was, as one commentator put it, "not courage, but madness." Where
expanding fazendas threatened the peasants of the Northeast, here it was the
rise of mid-sized commercial enterprises taking advantage of the growing urban
markets in the region. Peasants have been reluctant to register their lands,
thereby losing whatever protection the courts might have afforded. The
increase in commercial agriculture with capital requirements beyond the
average small farmers's means has jeopardized both their tenancy and their
livelihood. Rising land values and population growth have further limited the
possibilities of maintaining landholdings. In the Northeast comparable
developments have led to a rise in seasonal wage labor, but in the Southeast
the trend has been toward more permanent migration to regional industrial
centers.

     In the hilly South peasants did not face competition from large holdings
but from progressive land fragmentation through inheritance. As colonists,
the European immigrants to the region received marginal land; transportation
was neglected to a degree even greater than the rule for rural areas. Where
settlers overcame these handicaps to any extent, the results provide a
dramatic contrast to the typical portrait of rural society. Small landholders
in the South form a relatively prosperous rural middle class. The family
farming regime spawned a host of small-scale factories and businesses.
Farmers' children were educated; rural neighborhoods supported an elementary
school, and the more promising students boarded in nearby towns for advanced
education. Families enjoyed significant occupational mobility over the
generations; farmers' sons and daughters became teachers, priests, nuns, and
established members of the urban professional and propertied classes. Where
off-farm employment or land was available elsewhere, fragmentation of holdings
through inheritance was limited as families gave their surplus heirs a
"grubstake" in a nonagricultural occupation or land in less settled areas.
The Southern peasant's technological repertoire is more elaborate than that of
the Nordestino peasant. Small farmers in the South use plows and a variety of
related implements pulled by draft animals. By the mid-1970s mechanized
implements and a variety of improved inputs were in use. The farmers' own
assessment of their agricultural achievements is modest but is one that many
rural dwellers might envy: "Who works here," they say, "need not go hungry."

     Mid-sized landholders are scarcely less distinguishable from small
farmers. Colonial-era sugar mills often demanded more cane than the owner's
fields could produce in order to be economically efficient. Mill owners would
accept cane on contract from mid-sized landholders. Often a mill owner would
lease part of his lands to another who was then obliged to provide a crew of
slaves for planting and harvesting. Sometimes the mill owner and his growers
were part of an extended family, but it was apparently not uncommon for
nonrelatives to be business partners, and their terms were anything but
advantageous to the grower. Indeed, he faced some of the same constraints
modern sharecroppers do. Owners had a tendency to evict growers after planting
and cultivating but before harvest and the dividing of the spoils.

     Mid-sized landholders fare much better in contemporary Brazil. What
distinguishes them from small farmers is less an absolute amount of land than
their wherewithal for exploiting new markets and taking advantage of changing
government policies; mid-sized, literate, commercial farmers were the chief
beneficiaries of the growing role of the courts in resolving land disputes.
It was also mid-sized landholders who stepped into the void to exploit the
growing demand for foodstuffs in the massive urban expansion along the Rio de
Janeiro-Sao Paulo axis.

     Brazilians have not been unaware of the pernicious effects of
concentrating so much land (and power) in so few hands. Attempts to establish
a rural middle class of yeoman farmers-a counterbalance to the influence of
plantation owners-date from the early 1800s. Most efforts foundered on that
very influence, however. Public and private efforts to set up colonies of
family farms ran afoul of plantation owners on two accounts. First, large
landowners were not anxious to relinquish land for the purpose. Second, they
were unwilling to have their dependent labor force lured away to greener
pastures. Not surprisingly, the sporadic efforts at colonization gave marginal
land to European immigrants, ignoring the mass of rural Luso-Brazilians.

     The settlement of northern Parana from the 1920s to 1950s that was
organized by a private colonization firm is the "man bites dog" story of
colonization schemes. The firm guaranteed settlers clear title to medium-sized
plots, built roads, and extended railroad service from Loudrina to Maringa.
The company planned urban centers, laid out city lots, and installed water and
electrical systems. The land disputes and violence typical of much frontier
expansion were at a minimum. Similarly, the colony founded by the National
Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional da
Colonizacao Reforma Agraria-INCRA) in Rondonia, was dramatically successful.
INCRA settled some 7,000 families on 100-hectare plots, opened many feeder
roads to connect with the main highway, and provided helicopters to enable
extension agents to reach farmers. The town of Ouro Preto had schools, a
health clinic, grain storage facilities, and an airstrip. The settlement was
largely peaceful.

     Most colonization projects have not been so fortunate. Former President
Emilio Garrastazu Medici's characterization of the Amazon as a "land without
men for men without land," proved too slim a basis for successful large-scale
settlement. Part of the problem in the 1970s and early 1980s was that INCRA
lacked the institutional infrastructure to deal with the number of settlers
projected. INCRA found itself in conflict with previous settlers who had
either bought land from private companies or simply taken possession by
squatters' rights. Colonists were at odds with squatters, squatters and
settlers with Indians, and private colonization firms with INCRA. The
possibilities for conflict were legion.

     The enormous confusion over land titles and registration added to the
problem. There were multiple sets of papers to the same property, a notable
lack of accurate land surveys, and numerous local and state officials willing
accept fraudulent titles. Further, the growing interest of fazendeiros and
prosperous (and absentee) businessmen and companies in frontier Amazon land
was another factor. The entrance of moneyed interests having the wherewithal
to fight protracted legal battles over land or, if necessary, evict settlers
forcibly made the 1960s-1970s expansion into the Amazon and the Center-West
seem like previous pushes to the frontier. The squatters cleared the forest
and planted crops only to be bought out or forced out-disposed of in any
event. The pattern is all too familiar; one large landowner investigating an
area he deemed too primitive to be of current interest commented: "Let the
beasts enter first. Let them suffer malaria and hepatitis and do the brutal
work of clearing the forest. Then we will come in with money when it is
ready."

     In 1981 the government reduced the length of peaceful occupancy necessary
to establish squatters' rights to land from 10 to five years. The trick was to
maintain any kind of possession-let alone peaceful. The final fillip was that
the frontier was closing. This round of land conflicts involved many peasants
who fled the northeastern drought in the early 1970s for Maranhao only to be
evicted by cattle ranchers later in the decade, or sharecroppers displaced in
Sao Paulo who settled in Mato Grosso only to be displaced there as well. They
were fast losing their forbearance and were increasingly reluctant to leave
lands they had cleared for uncertain tenancy in more remote areas. Rural
unions, the Roman Catholic Church, and a variety of grass-roots organizations
were increasingly active in pressing for settlers' rights. There seemed to be
a sense, as one settler (from Sao Paulo via Mato Grosso) put it, that "to die
of an arrow or of a shot or of malaria or of hunger is all the same to me."