Brazilian squatters stage mass invasion of unused property in Sao Paulo

Brazilian squatters stage mass invasion of unused property in Sao Paulo
By ALAN CLENDENNING

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) - Squatters staged mass property invasions in Brazil's largest city Monday, saying President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's effort to redistribute land to the poor is falling short.

Riot police used tear gas to eject hundreds of squatters who broke into a vacant building in Sao Paulo's centre before dawn. But hundreds more successfully invaded a large plot of vacant land on the city's outskirts and started setting up makeshift shacks.

In the downtown confrontation, police arrested eight people and said three suffered minor injuries.

At least 500 more squatters were prevented from breaking into three more vacant buildings because police arrived at the sites first, authorities said.

The invasions came in the wake of a wave of rural property takeovers by landless Brazilians across the country upset with the pace of land reform by Silva, Brazil's first working-class president.

Silva, speaking out about the land invasions for the first time since they escalated last month, said Monday on his weekly Coffee with the President radio program that his government is trying to grant 130,000 titles to people squatting on unused land across the country.

He said Brazil's landless are free to protest, but suggested the rise of land and property invasions - loudly criticized by business groups, ranchers and the country's centrist politicians - could hurt the government's land reform efforts.

"People should not lose their sense of responsibility," Silva said. "People should realize that acting radically does not help us."

But 15 months after Silva took office, the leaders of the urban and rural squatters groups say land and property reform efforts by his administration have fallen short. The problem of land ownership among Brazil's rural and urban poor is one of the starkest signs of inequality in a country where more than 40 million people earn less than $1.35 Cdn a day.

"These occupations wouldn't be necessary if the government did more to help us find places to live," said Roque Cuello, who is helping oversee the squatters setting up camp Monday on a 1.5-hectare vacant lot owned by Sao Paulo's state government.

The urban property invasion attempts are the first since last July, when thousands of squatters took over four large, unused apartment buildings and a huge lot owned by Volkswagen in front of one of the carmaker's biggest Brazilian plants.

The urban squatters with the Workers Without a Roof Movement and the rural squatters aligned with the Landless Rural Workers Movement gave Silva strong support for his landslide 2002 electoral victory.

About 90 per cent of Brazil's land is owned by just 20 per cent of the country's 178 million people. The poorest 40 per cent of the population hold just one per cent.

In the last month alone, the landless rural group says it has moved nearly 100,000 people onto rural land it says is not being used. Under Brazil's constitution, the government can expropriate land considered unproductive after compensating the owners at fair value.

The squatters invade land and buildings, resist eviction proceedings and live there for years - trying to gain title to the properties.

The highest concentration of rural land invasions is in the destitute northeastern state of Pernambuco, where Silva was born and lived as a boy. Like many northeastern Brazilians, Silva and his family joined a massive internal migration looking for work in the southern city of Sao Paulo, where he became a union leader before founding Brazil's leftist Workers party in 1980.