The occupation took place days after hundreds of rural families were evicted from a property
Maracas
On Tuesday, Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) occupied the Companhia de Ferro das Ligas da Bahia (FERBASA), a mining company located in the city of Maracas.
The occupation of this company’s offices took place days after hundreds of rural families were evicted from a FERBASA property in the municipality of Planaltino on April 27.
At the end of March, landless rural workers camped in that property trying for the third time to have a permanent place of residence in an area that the employers had abandoned.
Abraao Brito, the MST speaker in the region of Chapada Diamantina, explained that the landless workers occupied the FERBASA headquarters to demand a permanent solution to their housing problems through a meeting with state and federal authorities.
The Catholic Church's Pastoral Land Commission registered an increase in killings of peasant leaders during the Bolsonaro years, so what kind of message did New York Times send Brazil's agribusiness elites with its article criminalizing the MST today? My report @telesurenglish pic.twitter.com/NwpWe0MfBA
— BrianMier (@BrianMteleSUR) April 30, 2023
In 2017, FERBASA agreed to give working families a few hectares of land so they can have a home and grow food. That commitment, however, was never fulfilled.
The tweet reads, “97 years of Milton Santos. He is recognized worldwide as one of the greatest geographers in history. He dedicated his life to analyzing his time. He was a fierce critic of the model of international relations that the advance of neoliberalism strengthened.”
According to the newspaper Brasil de Fato, FERBASA rejected the occupation of its headquarters and described the actions of the landless workers as “unilateral”, arguing that the company has been in dialogue with the MST to definitively resolve the problem.
Earlier, on the weekend before International Workers’ Day, the MST activists also occupied three large farms in Rio Grande do Norte and one farm in Bahia.
In April 29, some 130 landless families occupied the Boa Esperanca farm in the city of Boa Vista do Tupim in the Chapada Diamantina region. Similar to the FERBASA case, this 1,300-hectare farm has remained abandoned for 18 years without being used productively.
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Courtesy: TeleSur (Posted on May 03, 2023)
