Lying under my mosquitero (mosquito net), well fed, and banheiado (bathed), I have no idea how to go about recounting my impressions of the trip to the 14 de Abril assentamento (the settlement where I am) or my first 24-odd hours here. Like any story, I’ll start at the beginning (or at least where I left off, as the pleistocene is a little far back).
As Dan Baron Cohen (hereafter Dan) ((my primary contact with the movement)) told me when we met in the Belem airport, as part of anthropology is about getting to the fieldsite, I was going to have quite an experience just getting there. And quite an experience I did have. Dan and I have been emailing for the last 8 months or so; he suggested the 14 de Abril assentamento as a potential field site, and because he has been working with the community here for the last ten years, he was able over the last 5 months to begin broaching the subject of my visit and research with the community, develop a basic “plan” for my time here, and basically get things set up for me. As it will become apparent throughout this blog post, there is absolutely no way one could get access into a social movement/community as I have without Dan’s help (and more importantly the trust he has developed with this community over the last decade. But more on this later.
So Dan and I met at the airport in Belem; I had originally been planning on taking an overnight bus to Maraba, and then a van to Eldorado das Carajas, and then a truck to “kilometer 2” and then a motorcycle the 45 minutes on the dirt road to the settlement, but when Manoela (Dan’s partner whom I had had dinner with surrepticiously a couple nights before in Belem) had spelled out for me the steps necessary to reach the settlement, I thought for my first time, arriving at night, in the rainy season, with two fairly large bags and a mandolin on a motorcycle, just a little more stress than I needed…..so I seized the lucky turn of events that had Dan coming through the airport in Belem, and booked a seat on his flight. So Dan and I met at the airport in Belem (you can tell that this is going to be a long entry…) and flew together to Maraba. Let’s just say that taking off, flying over, and landing in the Amazon, even on a rainy day (which every day is in the rainy season in the Amazon) is on par with flying over Patagonia or the glaciers in Alaska; put simply, unbelievable. One truly begins to get a sense of scale seing the many tributaries of the amazon merge and split. Additionally, as it is the rainy season there is extensive flooding in areas, and the villages near the runway were just completely inundated, which was literally breath taking (in a bad way) to fly over at a 100 feet.
So we arrived in Maraba (an airport of smaller stature than Bozeman for those in the Boze-know). Dan rented a car, and after a few wrong turns (there are literally no signs) we were off. It was about an hour drive on a paved road to El dorado das carajas. The drive was truly unforgettable; aside from having Dan ( a truly wonderful human being) to talk with, the landscape and the road kept my attention riveted. The road first: it was “paved” although approximately every 20 seconds there was either a pothole that looked like it had just eaten a car (and was still hungry) or the side of the road had washed away in the rain. Dan was literally racing against the impending nightfall, as he instructed me that this was the easy part of the trip, and we still had 45 minutes on a mud road awaiting us….Now the landscape; breathtaking would be one word, although not necessarily, at all, in a good way; basically an hour or so of driving by battle pastures, and secondary growth, with the very occasional giant lone rainforest tree still standing. Truly breathtaking and very depressing, basically to think that 100 years ago the entire area would have been continuous rainforest.
But perhaps more than the landscape (and the amazing rainbow that we tracked for quite a while) what was really amazing was seeing the acampamentos of the MST on the side of the road and in fields. We probably passed 4 or so of these acampamentos on our way down to Eldorado (to remind the reader, within the context of the MST, an acampamento (or encampment) is both spatially and temporally primary, it is the first type of :”settlement” that the MST makes when they try to expropriate land. An encampment becomes a settlement when it becomes legally recognized by the government and landowners (which can take upwards of 5 years). During this time, the people are living in makeshift shelters of whatever materials are around, such as plastic tarps or palm fronds. It was extremely powerful to be travelling towards this settlement (where I knew I was going to be living and forming relationships with the people there) and passing by encampments of people who were struggling for the exact thing that “my” settlement had achieved, namely land.
However, no community should have to experience what it “took” for this community to “win” the land. April 17th is a holiday of resistance of sorts, it is known as Dia do Via Campesina. As the story goes, on this day in 1996 the settlers were beginning an encampment of the side of the road, pressing the government to expropriate and release the land that they were claiming was being unused. What happened next there are many different stories for: the basic story is that the police confronted, and massacred 19 of the settlers encamped on the road side. As one drives towards Eldorado das Carajas, one comes across the site of, and memorial to the massacre. The memorial is quite impressive, it’s a series of 19 castanehda trees that were burnt and then planted in the ground in the shape of Brazil. As one can see by this photo, the trees simply tower over the landscape. Quite an impressive memorial to say the least.
Once we reached Eldorado we got off on a dirt (mud) road and to make a long story shorter, basically battled innumerable potholes to reach our destination…..
O Assentamento 17 de Abril.
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