The demonstration coincided with the closing of the Meeting of Organizations and Peoples of the Countryside, Water and the Rainforest that was being held in the Brazilian capital since Monday 20. 7,000 people participated in the first such meeting held in fifty years.

The main social and trade unión organizations of Brazil participated in the meeting, such as: La Vía Campesina, the National Confederation of Agriculture Workers (Contag), the Federation of Family Farmers (Fetraf), as well as the agroecological, indigenous and quilombolas organizations.

The aim of the meeting was to come up with a common pattern of demands and struggles that will translate into public policies towards an agrarian reform.

A leader of the Rural Landless Peasant Movement of Brazil (MST), Alexandre Conceiçao, told Real World Radio that the organizations consider “the figures regarding the agrarian reform under Dilma Roussef’s administration have been the worst in the past 17 years, which means that even some right-wing governments have done more than the current Brazilian administration that benefits extractivist industries, transnational corporations and agribusiness”.

While the interview was taking place, 10,000 people from around the country where gathering outside the Presidential Palace Reading the conclusions of the meeting summarized in the “Countryside, Rainforest and Water Manifesto”.

Truck drivers, public servants and university professors, who have been on strike for several months, also joined the demonstration.

“Agribusiness through the world’s biggest transnational corporations is taking over all our natural resources while the agrarian reform in Brazil is totally parallized”, said the MST leader.

On 2012 is the 51st anniversary of the first Peasant Assembly held in Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais state), which is the main precedent of today’s meeting. In fact, the conclusions drawn from the 1961 meeting set the ground for defining the community needs.

Alexandre said about their position regarding Dilma Roussef’s administration: “we chose Dilma so that she would make the people’s, not the capital’s project come true”.

Photo: María Mello (MST)

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