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| From Venezuela to Brasil- A continent in revolt!![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Globalise Resistance Bulletin April 15th 2002 Globalise Resistance Public meeting this Saturday with Don Baron, activist from the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra - MST - Brasil. Weekly information and campaign update. Edited by Joe Carolan This week- 1. Public Meeting with Don Baron, MST Brasil
Globalise Resistance Public Meeting with The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement is the largest social movement in Latin America and one of the most successful grassroots movements in the world. Hundreds of thousands of landless peasants have taken onto themselves the task of carrying out a long-overdue land reform in a country mired by an overly skewed land distribution pattern. Less than 3% of the population owns two-thirds of Brasil's arable land. While 60% of Brasil's farmland lies idle, 25 million peasants struggle to survive by working in temporary agricultural jobs. The Landless Workers' Movement (MST) is a response to these inequalities. In 1985, with the support of the Catholic Church, hundreds of landless rural Brasilians took over an unused plantation in the south of the country and successfully established a cooperative there. They gained title to the land in 1987. Today more than 250,000 families have won land titles to over 15 million acres after MST land takeovers. In 1999 alone, 25,099 families occupied unproductive land. There are currently 71,472 families in encampments throughout Brazil awaiting government recognition. The success of the MST lies in its ability to organize. Its members have not only managed to secure land, thereby guaranteeing food security for their families, but have come up with an alternative socio-economic development model that puts people before profits. This is transforming the face of Brasil's countryside and Brasilian politics at large. These gains have not come without a cost, however. Violent clashes between the MST and police, as well as landowners, have become commonplace, claiming the lives of many peasants and their leaders. In the past 10 years, more than 1000 people have been killed as a result of land conflicts in Brasil. Prior to August 1999, only 53 of the suspected murders have been brought to trial. The MST has resisted this repression and has been able to gather support from a broad international network of human rights groups, religious organizations, and labor unions. It has received a number of international awards, including The Right Livelihood Award and an education award from UNICEF. In order to maximize production, the MST has created 60 food cooperatives as well as a small agricultural industries. Their literacy program involves 600 educators who presently work with adults and adolescents. The movement also monitors 1,000 primary schools in their settlements, in which 2,000 teachers work with about 50,000 kids. Globalise Resistance is pleased to host a public meeting with Don Baron, a full time activist with the MST, this Saturday. Don will also be talking about the huge upsurge in struggle in other Latin American countries, from the community councils and the uprising against the IMF in Argentina, to the huge mobilisations to defend the popularly elected government of Victor Chavez against a CIA/ Big Business backed military coup in Venezuela. All are welcome. 3pm this Saturday 21st April at the 2. SESSIONs Every Sunday until Mayday from 1pm to 5pm at SPACECRAFT Warehouse at the end of Stranville Street, North Strand, Dublin 1. Globalise Resistance are building a huge These packhorses will be supervised by the military wing of the United Corporations of America, who will carry the flag of the We now need need chains, the iron ones preferably, as well as costumes If you're interested in helping out, give us a phone at 087 9032281- STILL NEEDED- COSTUMES:
Todays Media Guardian featured an excellent detailed report on the work of IMC Palestine From Aidan in Irish Indymedia
The movement written off after September 11 is demonstrating its worth in Palestine
The second set of human shields has deliberately placed itself in the line of fire. Since the army's offensive in the West Bank began, hundreds of Israeli peace campaigners and foreign activists have been seeking to put themselves in its way. At great personal risk, members of the International Solidarity Movement have sought to protect civilians by making hostages of themselves. It is a display of extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice. It is also the latest incarnation of a movement which just months ago was left for dead. The movement to which many of the peace activists now risking their lives in Ramallah and Bethlehem belong has no name. Some people have called it an anti-globalisation or anti-corporate or anti-capitalist campaign. Others prefer to emphasise its positive agenda, calling it a democracy or internationalist movement. But because they have always put practice first and theory second, its members have proved impossible to categorise. Whenever it appears to have assumed an identity outsiders believe they can grasp, it morphs into something else. It is driven by a new, responsive politics, informed not by ideology but by need. After September 11, this nameless thing appeared to vanish as swiftly as it had emerged. The huge demonstrations planned for the end of September against the World Bank and IMF in Washington became a small and rather timorous march for peace. Most US activists, cowed by the new McCarthyism which has dominated American discourse since the attack on New York, kept their heads down. Commentators dismissed the movement as a passing fad which had rippled through the world's youth, as widespread and as insubstantial as Diet Coke or the Nike swoosh. But those who dismissed it had failed to grasp either the seriousness of its intent or the breadth of its support. The television cameras always focussed on a few hundred young men dressed in black and running riot, intercut occasionally with the wider carnival of protest. But they seldom permitted its participants to explain the sense of purpose which propelled them. So most outsiders failed to see that the commitment of many of the people involved in these protests is non-negotiable. The movement is no more likely to go away than the governments and corporations it confronts. Its survival is assured by its ability to become whatever it needs to be. Last month, 250,000 protesters travelled to Barcelona to contest the assault on employment laws and the public sector being led by Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Maria Aznar. This month, some of them moved to Palestine. Among those in the British contingent are people who have helped to run campaigns against corporate power, genetic engineering and climate change. They were joined this week by members of the Italian organisation Ya Basta!, which helped to coordinate the protests in Genoa. For the movement which came of age in Seattle, the World Bank and the West Bank belong to the same political territory. If the protesters simply shifted as a mob from one location to another, their efforts would be worse than useless. But one of the key lessons this rapidly maturing movement has learnt is that protest is effective only if it builds on the efforts of specialists. Like most of the earth's people, the foreigners on the West Bank first became visible when they began to bleed (five British campaigners were injured last week by the Israeli army's illegal fragmentation bullets); but some outsiders have been working there for decades. New arrivals join long-established networks and do what they are told. Among the bullets and the bulldozers, the movement is discovering a courage long suspected but seldom tried. The protesters have moved into the homes of people threatened with bombardment by the Israeli army, ensuring that the soldiers cannot attack Palestinians without attacking foreigners too. They have been sitting in the ambulances taking sick or injured people to hospital, in the hope of speeding their passage through Israeli checkpoints and preventing the soliders from beating up the occupants. They have been trying to run convoys of food and medicine into neighbourhoods deprived of supplies; and seeking to encourage both sides to lay down their arms in favour of non-violent solutions. They are becoming, in other words, a sort of grassroots United Nations, trying with their puny resources to keep the promises their governments have broken. Perhaps most importantly, the peace campaigners are the only foreign witnesses in some places to the the atrocities being committed. Using alternative news networks such as Indymedia and Allsorts, they have been able to draw attention to events most journalists have missed. They have seen how Palestinians, told by the Israeli army that the curfew had been lifted, have been either shot dead when they step outside or seized and used as human shields. They have witnessed the sacking of homes and the deliberate destruction of people's food supplies. They have seen ambulances and aid trucks being stopped and crushed. On Thursday 28th March one peace protester watched Israeli soldiers in jeeps hunting women and children who were fleeing across the fields on the outskirts of Ramallah, trying to shoot them down in cold blood. And, by becoming the story themselves, as they are beaten and shot, the foreigners have brought it home to people who were dismissive of the murder and maiming of indigenous civilians. The movement's arrival on the West Bank is an organic development of its activities elsewhere. For years it has been contesting the destructive foreign policies of the world's most powerful governments, and the corresponding failures of the multilateral institutions to contain them. Rather than echo the thunderous but effete demand of commentators on both sides of the Atlantic that Yasser Arafat (a man currently unable to use a flushing toilet) should stamp out the terror in the Middle East, the campaigners, as ever, are addressing those who wield real power: Israel and the governments who supply the money and weaponry which permit it to occupy the West Bank. The movement has always been a pragmatic one, as ready to protest against Burma's treatment of its tribal people or China's dispossession of the Tibetans as the IMF's handling of Argentina. In Palestine, as elsewhere, it is seeking to place itself between power and those whom power afflicts. Everyone else on earth is demanding that somebody should do something about the conflict in the Middle East. The peace campaigners are doing it. 5. The demonstration of up to 500,000 people 16 March in Barcelona to protest at the EU Summit being held that weekend in the city represented a new highpoint in the anti-capitalist movement that has spread around the world since Seattle. It was also of huge significance given the obsessive pessimism and apparent weakness of the Spanish left. One example: after anot particularly well-organised, 20,000-strong demonstration against the war in Afghanistan last October in Barcelona the soft left successfully Who ís who. Foro Social de Barcelona (Barcelona Social Forum, FSB): this groups together the parliamentary left in Catalonia: PSC (Socialist Party); ERC (left The development of the movement During the nineties, with the collapse of the far left and the decline of the CP, more and more young people looking for some form of activity On a smaller scale the mobilisations for Prague and Nice proved relatively successful, involving thousands of people in the meetings and protests March 2002. In contrast, a mass student movement had It was not until three or four weeks before that suddenly everything began to move. The media in Catalonia were giving extensive and serious During the days leading up to the Summit both the CCECG and FSB organised aseries of seminars, debates, film shows etc., mainly in the On Friday, the 15th, there were decentralised actions all over Barcelona, including a lobby hunt involving 2,000 activists; a bicycle demo; a Saturday morning saw a series of very successful workshops_ attended by some 5,000 people - organised by the CCECG on War (with a speaker from By Saturday midday things were looking good ñ the most optimistic of us were thinking that 50,000 would be a good turnout. The real figure isobviously hard to calculate. The police said 250,000 (the police in Spain give notoriously low estimates based on how many people arrive at the Why was it so big ? Both Genoa and, in particular, Porto Alegre (which got equal coverage in the media to the WEF meeting in New York) have provoked much interest in recent months. Before the demonstration an opinion poll showed that 42% of Barcelona's population supported the aims of the anti-globalisation movement after March 16 this had risen to 57%. Onwards to Seville! (GR will be organising transport options at the Don Baron meeting this Saturday at the Vietnamese Centre for all those interested in going. If you want posters to help advertise the meeting, or need any further information- give us a phone at 087 9032281- also feel free to contribute articles and opinions at the website that's up again at http://www.globaliseresistance.cjb.net AND join the interactive updated e group at
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