Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) is widely regarded as one of the world’s most dynamic mass movements. In the 20 years since its inception, the MST has mobilized hundreds of thousands of rural workers in the struggle for land reform. Despite frequently violent responses to their occupations of idle land, the movement has managed to settle an estimated 350,000 families in small rural holdings throughout the country. But in recent months, attention has focused on one of the MST’s younger and less well-known urban cousins: the Roofless Movement of Salvador (MSTS). The organization boasted 12,000 members only six months after its founding in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil’s third most populous city after São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. As a homeless peoples’ movement, the MSTS tries to correct the jarring inequalities of the city by focusing attention on the plight of the excluded and urban poor.
Utilizing strategies similar to those of its rural cousin, the MSTS occupies abandoned or empty buildings and lots across the city to house homeless families and pressure the government to redress Salvador’s enormous housing deficit. A local government spokesman claims that homes need to be built for 90,000 people, a number MSTS coordinator Pedro Cardoso laughs at: “Get real, it’s more like 150,000.”
An accurate count of the homeless population is difficult to come by because Salvador, like other large Brazilian cities, has a vast number of poor inhabitants camping out on a near-permanent basis in the homes of friends and relatives. A name even exists for the practice: to live de favor. According to the 2000 census, 16.5 million people live de favor in Brazil—more than 10% of the total population. But these living arrangements are often inhumane and are rarely sustainable. Twenty-four-year-old Juciara Pereira lived with her husband Raimundo and their six children in her mother’s two-room house in Salvador until it became untenable. Raimundo, who collects used cans and cardboard on the streets to sell to a local recycling company, simply doesn’t earn enough for them to even consider renting a place of their own. Thanks to the MSTS they are now on the city government’s subsidized housing list.
In the past, families like Juciara’s would squat on a neglected city hillside, where they might build a shack and make their home. With the explosion of rural migration to the cities in the 1950s and 1960s came the growth of the notorious favelas (shantytowns) that still clutter the urban landscape. But now much of the available space is already inhabited. Space shortages in the favelas became more acute in the 1990s with the introduction of limited services in a concerted government effort to urbanize favelas in much of the country. Many, though certainly not most, of the favelas enjoy electricity, sewage, paved roads and transportation networks, linking them to the larger city. Although these services are welcome improvements, the already limited space in a favela now comes at an unattainable premium for people like Juciara and Raimundo, forcing them to settle on land ever further from Salvador’s city center.
As settlements move further to the periphery, services become limited or non-existent and violence is a constant threat. The MSTS seeks to prevent this literal and figurative peripheral existence by using what already exists within the city. “It’s a perverse logic,” says Cardoso. “People go homeless while space and empty buildings in the city center abound. We want to see the right to housing respected as a basic element of citizenship, and we think that’s best done by direct action. We occupy buildings that aren’t being put to a socially beneficial use in order to house needy homeless people.”
One such building is the Portuguese Club of Salvador. Once a chic private club with spacious reception halls, a restaurant and swimming pools in a prime seafront location, it underwent foreclosure in the mid-1990s, leaving it empty and boarded up. In February, however, some 200 MSTS members tore down the barricades and took over the abandoned club. They organized work teams to clear debris and clean the buildings, allowing families to move in with their few possessions. The largest reception hall is now divided by sheets of plastic and pieces of wood and cardboard to afford some privacy to the 20 families living in the space. At last count, the entire club was home to 154 families.
Living conditions are basic and the clubhouse is in disrepair. Rainwater gushes through the moldy roof and the empty swimming pools are a worrisome hazard considering the many children in the camp. Water for cooking and washing is only available from a single tap behind what used to be the club’s pool bar and has to be carried in buckets past the decrepit diving board and broken sun loungers. “It’s still worth it,” says Anderson Santos, a rangy 29-year-old standing under the crumbling balconies and broken windows. “Before joining the movement I lived in my parent’s two-room house with my three brothers and sisters, my wife and my two kids. I’ve been unemployed for four years, unable to provide for my family, feeling alone.” The future of the Portuguese Club occupation is uncertain, and the building is barely able to house so many people, but Anderson is optimistic: “The occupation has raised awareness among the local population of the housing issue. That’s what’s important.”
The work of the MSTS does not end with the occupations. “We’re here to try to build a sense of community,” explains Cardoso. Every occupation elects coordinators who organize cleaning committees, childcare, night watch duties, and construction and repair teams. Camp meetings take place every Saturday to discuss issues that inevitably arise from living in such close proximity. Members must attend at least one in three meetings or risk expulsion. Alcohol and drugs are banned. Organizing in this way has helped overcome hostility from local neighborhoods. “They can see for themselves that we’re not criminals, that all we want is to be listened to,” says Cardoso. In fact, some occupations have even received donations of food and clothing from neighborhood groups.
“There’s a real feeling of solidarity in this camp,” says Luciana Moura, one of five coordinators at the largest MSTS occupation, a piece of unused land near Salvador’s airport that is home to more than 350 families. “We had a fire at the beginning of January in one of the shacks and had to pull down some of the surrounding shacks to stop the fire from spreading. But we all helped to rebuild them afterwards, using whatever we could find.” Luciana’s fellow coordinators are all women, reflecting the movement’s gender make-up. Around 70% of MSTS members are women, often single mothers, and in most cases unemployed. Luciana is undaunted by the challenges she faces: “We’re taking responsibility for our lives, showing this macho society that we’re capable, that we can organize and that we know our rights.”
So what has the MSTS achieved so far? The housing issue has taken center stage in Salvador with the coming local elections in October. The violent evictions by police experienced in the early stages of the movement have been replaced with a more conciliatory policy on the part of the local government, which is promising to accelerate its affordable housing program. But, says Cardoso, it is “too little, too slow—we will continue our policy of occupations to put pressure on the government.”
The MSTS is far from isolated. Similar movements exist in cities across the country. In São Paulo, the Movement of Homeless Peoples from the Center (MSTC) is pressing the government to deal with the anomalies of South America’s wealthiest and most populous city. According to Manoel Del Rio, a lawyer representing the MSTC, 15,000 people live on the streets of São Paulo, while 400 buildings and lots lie empty and unused in the city center.
Cardoso hopes the government of former lathe worker and trade unionist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will move to address these problems. “The existence of the Lula government opens up a space for us to operate, since we know he’s sympathetic to our demands,” explains Cardoso. “With the government in the financial straitjacket of the IMF and international lenders, it’s our job to mobilize in order to remind the government that we are here, that we are the government’s true support base,” warns Cardoso with a cautionary tone. “We’re not opposing the government, but trying to keep it on the path that led us to vote for it. We haven’t been around for long, but we’re an army of citizens, no longer prepared to accept exclusion and poverty.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Watson is a freelance writer. He also works with Viva Rio’s Website www.desarme.org, a Brazilian disarmament portal.
