From the beginning of the 1950s, a biased campaign organized by the Marxist inspired mass-media began to present Brazil as the land of injustice and social imbalances, of the great unproductive landed estates and the miserable “favelas” (shantytowns) on the outskirts of the upper-class neighbourhoods of the big cities. “Land reform” was presented as the only means capable of satisfying the elementary requirements of justice crushed by the owners. This presentation of the problem was based on false doctrinal premises and on a similarly false vision of the Brazilian socio-economic situation.
Actually, the greatest unproductive estate of Brazil and of the world is that composed of the immense area of lands belonging to the State. About 50 percent of Brazilian territory is today made up of lands that belong to the federal, state and municipal authorities of the country.36 It is, therefore, difficult to understand, except in the light of a Marxist ideology, a “Land reform” that, rather than distributing public lands, wants to confiscate the private lands which, in spite of everything, have made Brazil the second country in the world, after the United States, in foodstuffs production.
The “Land reform”, demanded by the Communist Party since the 1920s, caught on especially in the circles of the Catholic left, of the university and media intelligentsia and in those of high finance.37 From the union of these forces, in 1960, at the suggestion of the Christian democrat governor of the State of São Paulo, Carvalho Pinto, a project of “Land revision” was born. It was also supported by the CNBB. The left-wing propaganda presented the rural situation as explosive, due to the discontent of the farm workers. It demanded the expropriation of the so-called unproductive landowners in order to distribute the land to the workers. The goal was to eliminate every form of large and medium-sized rural property, to reduce agricultural properties to minimal dimensions, ultimately driving the country into hunger.
On 10 November 1960, a large manifesto published on the front page of the most important newspapers of Brazil announced the launching of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s book Reforma Agraria. Questão de Consciência (Land Reform — A Matter of Conscience).38 The first part of the work was written by Dr Plinio himself. However, the text was submitted for theological review to Bishop Antônio de Castro Mayer and to Bishop Geraldo de Proença Sigaud, respectively bishops of Campos and of Jacarezinho, so they could be co-authors. The second part of the book was written by the economist Luiz Mendonça de Freitas. It was of a strictly technical nature, and demonstrated how Brazil produced in abundance both for its needs and for development, without its economy being in any way limited by the presence of the large estates.
Because of the clarity of its reasoning, the fame of its authors, and also because of its widespread distribution, the book immediately became a “national case”. Its discussion spread from the squares to the newspapers, the radio, the television and to the halls of Congress. “The book produced a shock not just in Brazil, but in all the international press. It also provoked strong reactions from the Brazilian episcopate.”39 While, in August 1961, a left-wing political exponent, João Goulart,40 who intended making “Land reform” his strong point, rose to power, Bishop Helder Câmara, general secretary of the CNBB and auxiliary bishop of Rio, announced that the reform project was “a document inspired by the principles of the social doctrine of the Church”.41 Brazilian public opinion did not, however, follow its bishops on this dangerous road that opened the doors to the Communist agenda for the country. The reaction of the people was not long in being made manifest, ending up in the military movement that in 1964 overthrew the President of the Republic Goulart.42 “In the doctrinal preparation of the movement”43 “a decisive role” was played by the “book-symbol against land reform”44 distributed by the TFP.
The fall of Goulart sent shock-waves around the world, and made it impossible for a Marxist-type Revolution to triumph in Brazil. The repercussions from the political field soon spread to the ecclesiastical field. In April 1964 Bishop Helder Câmara left his position with the CNBB, becoming archbishop of Olinda and Recife, while Cardinal Vasconcellos Motta was transferred from the archdiocese of São Paulo to that of Aparecida. In the same year the leaders of the CNNB were replaced by moderates. Archbishop Helder Câmara was replaced as secretary by Bishop José Gonçalves, auxiliary bishop of the cardinal of Rio, Jaime Câmara; while the archbishop of Ribeirão Preto, Agnelo Rossi, was elected as president of the organization. He replaced Cardinal Vasconcellos Motta as archbishop of São Paulo.
The “coup” that, under the presidency of Marshal Castelo Branco, brought the military to power is known in Brazil as the “Revolution of 64”.45 It clamped down on the Communist organizations, but it was not able to set up a programme of positive psychological and cultural recovery. While in the moderate circles the illusion of having finally averted the Communist danger spread, the left-wing exponents began infiltrating the university and secondary school teaching environments and the media.
On 30 November 1964 Marshal Castelo Branco signed an Estatuto da Terra (Statute of the Land) in the same style and spirit as the “Land reform” of Goulart. The implementation of the document was, however, slow and steady, from its promulgation to the Primeiro Plano Nacional de Reforma Agrária — PNRA (First National Plan of Land Reform) launched by the Sarney government in October 1985. And for twenty years Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira opposed it rigorously and tirelessly.
When, in February 1980, the general assembly of the CNBB, gathered in Itaicí, issued a document entitled Igreja e problemas da terra — IPT (The Church and the land problem) in favour of “Land reform”, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira replied with his book Sou católico: posso ser contra a Reforma Agrária? (I am Catholic: can I be against Land Reform?), demonstrating the contrast between the Magisterium of the Church and the document of the Episcopal Conference and denouncing its obvious Socialist and Marxist formulation.46 Another book by the Brazilian thinker in defence of private property and free enterprise appeared in 1985,47 as the country was being swept by a movement of violent rural demonstrations, with the invasion and occupation of privately owned lands.48 The urgency of the “Land reform” was justified by the occupation of the land,49 rare up to 1985, but increasingly more widespread after the appearance of the PNRA.
The aim of the new book was to give the farm owners knowledge of their rights, to urge them to protect themselves with prudence and energy in order to avoid, once again, the implementation of the confiscatory “Land reform”.50 Its Socialist nature is revealed especially by the economic sanctions suffered by those who are dispossessed: public authorities pay, often with great delay and with devaluated money, a price for dispossession that is vastly inferior to the price of the land. But “Land reform” is also Socialist due to the fact that the manual labourer to whom the land is transferred becomes, in fact, not a small landowner, but a member of a state farm co-operative, who holds the property rights of the land. He thus becomes an employee of the State. In this sense “present agrarian legislation harms, as we see it, both the landowner and the manual labourer in the field. Everything benefits the State. And this is socialism”.51
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s battle against “Land reform” forms part of a constant defence of private property and free enterprise that makes the Brazilian thinker the greatest apostle in our century of the social doctrine of the Church on this specific point.
Today one tends to forget that private property is a fundamental point of Catholic doctrine52: “Christian conscience” confirms Pius XII “cannot acknowledge the justice of a social order that denies or makes practically impossible or vain the natural right of ownership both of consumer goods and of production goods”.53
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira always stressed the importance of this doctrinal point, the least understood by the modern world that is so full of egalitarianism and selfishness.54 Since the Thirties he had seen the attack on private property as “a profound upheaval of the whole social body” that opened the doors “to all communist embryonic forms”.55
It should be noted that Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira was not, as some might believe, or allow themselves to believe, a “landowner”. Although a descendant of agricultural dynasties, his family had lost, since the Twenties, any wealth derived from land. This absolute lack of personal interests to be defended testifies to the nobility of his struggle at a time when many of the main owners of urban and rural properties of the country decisively supported the left- wing groups and parties.
Notes:
36. At the beginning of the 1960s the percentage of public land was much higher.
37. Cf. Gileno De Carli, História da Reforma Agraria, Brasília, Gráfica Brasiliana, 1985.
38. Cf. Various Authors, Reforma Agraria. Questão de Consciência, São Paulo, Editora Vera Cruz, 1960, had numerous editions in Brazil, Argentina (1963), Spain (1969), Colombia (1971), totalling some forty-one thousand copies. It was followed by a positive programme of agrarian policies by the same authors, the Declaration of Morro Alto that had two editions in Portuguese.
39. José Luis Gonzalez-Balado, Câmara, l’évêque rouge?, (Québec, Editions Paulinas, 1978), p. 53.
40. On João Goulart (1919-76), cf. the entry of Marieta de Morais Ferreira, César Benjamim, in DHBB, vol. II, pp. 1504-21. In his message to Congress in March 1962, Goulart demanded reforms in the banking system, in public administration, in taxes and “Land Reform, the great Brazilian aspiration” which he describes as “an irresistible idea-force” (Message to the National Congress, Rio de Janeiro, 1962, pp. XI-XII). “Land Reform can no longer be postponed (…) other reforms are also imperative” (Folha de S. Paulo, 2 May 1962). “His main concern was Land Reform. He lived for this. It really was his fixed idea” recalls his widow Maria Teresa Goulart. Manchete, 1 April 1978.
41. On 30 April a document of the central commission of the CNBB was cf. “La Documentation Catholique”, no. 1403 (July 1963), col. 899-906.
42. On 19 March 1964, a great “Marcha da Família com Deus pela liberdade”, gathered 500,000 people in São Paulo. Eleven days later the army intervened. Goulart was forced to leave Brazil while another mass demonstration, in Rio, on 2 April, gathered a million people in support of the new regime.
43. Thomas Niehaus, Brady Tyson, The Catholic Right in contemporary Brazil: the case of the Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, in Religion in Latin America. Life and Literature, edited by Lyle Brown and William Cooper, (Waco (Texas), Markharm Press Fund, 1980), p. 399. According to Georges-André Fiechter also, the TFP “played an important role in mobilizing the people against Goulart in 1964”. Le régime modernisateur du Brésil, 1964-1972. Etude sur les interactions politico-économiques dans un régime militaire contemporain, (Leiden, A. W. Sijthoff, 1972), p. 175. Cf. also Emanuel de Kadt, Catholic Radicals in Brazil, (London, Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 98.
44. M. Moreira Alves, O Cristo do Povo, (Rio de Janeiro, Ed. Sabía, 1968), p. 271.
45. Between 1964 and 1984, Generals Humberto Castelo Branco (1964-7), Arthur da Costa e Silva (1967-9), Emilio Garrastazu Medici (1969-74), Ernesto Geisel (1974-9), João Baptista Figuereido (1979-84) succeeded one another in power in Brazil. The ideological base of the regime founded in 1964 was the doctrine of “national security” elaborated in the Escola Superior de Guerra, widely known as “Sorbonne”. The doctrine of “national security” developed a concept of global war to be fought on various fronts (economic, political, psychological) to guarantee Brazil’s role as a “power”. T. E. Skidmore, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil 1964-1985, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988.
46. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Carlos Patricio del Campo, Sou católico: posso ser contra a Reforma Agrária?, São Paulo, Editora Vera Cruz, 1981. Carlos Patrício del Campo, was born in Santiago of Chile in 1940 and graduated in agrarian engineering, he then specialized at Berkeley; teacher of Agronomy at the Catholic University of Chile, since 1972 he collaborates with the financial and administrative department of the Brazilian TFP. Four editions were printed, totalling 29,000 copies of his book and distributed among the intellectual elites of Brazil and especially among the land owners. During this period the TFP distributed two issues of “Catolicismo” (no. 402 of June 1984 and no. 406-07 of October-November 1984) dedicated to re-awakening Brazilian public opinion from its lethargy.
47. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, C. P. del Campo, A propriedade privada e a livre iniciativa, no tufão agro-reformista, São Paulo, Editora Vera Cruz, 1985. 1986, see also, with a preface by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, the publication of the work by C. P. del Campo, Is Brazil sliding toward the extreme Left? Notes on the Land Reform Program in South America’s largest and most populous country (New York, The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, 1986), in which the author documents how at the root of “Land reform” there are no serious economic evaluations, but only an ideological stand corrupted by an egalitarian and socialist spirit.
48. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Invasões, reforma agrária e temas conexos”, Folha de S. Paulo, 21 April 1986.
49. According to statistics of the Brazilian government itself and research of expert institutes, a good part, sometimes the majority, of the invaders of the land were not native agricultural workers, but often city dwellers and even small land owners.
50. In 1988 the TFP published a manifesto, “Ao término de décadas de luta cordial, alerta da TFP ao Centrão” (Folha de Paulo, 28 April 1988), that traces the results of almost three decades of struggle against “Land Reform”, recalling how from the very beginning it had foreseen that the land-reform movement would have provoked analogous movements in the building and city sectors, as well as in that of industrial and commercial businesses. Reforma agrária. Questão de consciência, pp. 157-8.
51. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Reforma Agrária: oportuno pronunciamento do Presidente da TFP”, Catolicismo, no. 429, September 1986.
52. Popes Leo XIII in the encyclical Rerum Novarum of 15 May 1891, Pius XI in the encyclical Quadragesimo anno of 15 May 1931, John XXIII in the encyclical Mater et Magistra of 15 May 1961, John Paul II in the encyclical Centesimus annus of 1 May 1991, authoritatively teach how property is a natural and inalienable right of man. St Thomas Aquinas states that “it is lawful”, indeed “it is necessary for human life to possess its own goods”, and that private property is a development of the natural right owed to human reason. Summa Theologica, IIa-IIae, q. 66, a. 2, reply e ad 2.
53. Pius XII, Radiomessage of 1 September 1944, in DR, vol. VI, p. 275.
54. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Liberdade, trabalho ou propriedade”, Folha de S. Paulo, 2 October 1968; “Propriedade privada”, Folha de S. Paulo, 30 May 1971; “Papas e propriedade privada”, Folha de S. Paulo, 6 June 1971. The Brazilian thinker did not ignore the “social function” of private property: “Free enterprise and individual property are irreplaceable to increase production. This is its principal function. Man will strive his best at work as long as he knows that he can accumulate, to his own advantage, the fruits of his labour and pass them on to his children. If this incentive is lacking, if all his work — excepting his wage — returns to the collectivity, he becomes a civil servant. That is why underproduction and, therefore, hunger is an inevitable evil of collectivist regimes”. ID., “Função social”, O Jornal, 30 September 1972.
55. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “A causa do comunismo”, O Jornal, 5 February 1936.