MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Landless peasants with 80 families occupy and take over farm in north of Uruguay

Raul Sendic founder of the Tupamaros guerrilla

The landless peasants’ movement has reached Uruguay: the self called “shaggy” ones with eighty families, have taken over a 400 hectares farm in the extreme north of the country Artigas, and have been occupying the land since.

“We have been through seven years of Broad Front government and very few peasants or paid farm hands have had access to a plot of land”, said Jorge Rodas president of the Union of Sugar Workers from Artigas, (UTAA).

The union was originally founded in the sixties by the Uruguayan urban guerrilla leader Raul Sendic and whose organization now as a political party belongs to the ruling catch-all Broad Front coalition which extends from the conservative Christian Democrats to Communists, Socialists, anarchists, Trotskyites and obviously the former guerrilla, whose current leader was elected in 2009 president of the country, Jose Mujica.

The idea of the ‘shaggies”, very similar to the MST, landless movement in Brazil and who have introduced the 80 families, is to remain for some time to send “a strong message to the government and the people of Uruguay”.

Rodas said that the organization keeps growing in number and is targeting farms minimally exploited or belonging to absentee landlords. “This is to tell government that if we have the strength to occupy private land, we will continue growing in the number of people who support us and are joining our movement”

“When we occupy a private farm is to tell government the problem faced by farm hands, by landless workers. We want government or whoever, to find a solution to the issue”, said Rodas who claims UTAA has 2.000 members.

Three leaders of UTAA have been summoned to court and in a brief release argue that the occupied farm belongs to a “money lender who gobbled the plots of small farmers”.

Artigas to the north of Uruguay and bordering Argentina and Brazil has an economy based on farming and non industrial mining, amethysts. However it also has sugar cane plantations and a sugar mill that has been exposed to political turmoil for over six decades.

The UTAA effectively was created in the sixties by Raul Sendic the founder of the urban Tupamaros guerrilla movement, and sugar cane planting since has been a sensitive issue in Uruguay. However the main fact is that growing sugar cane in the north of Uruguay is simply not profitable compared to the huge efficient crops of Brazil and Argentina.

However since winning the election in 2004 and repeating in 2009, the ruling Broad Front coalition has made it a political question to ensure sugar cane plantations, this time mainly for a bio-fuel project and has promised to distribute land to the “shaggies”, which so far has not happened.

So even when the occupation of farms in the north of Uruguay, in the sugar cane area of Bella Union can be interpreted as a repeat of the well organized Landless Movement in Brazil, it is in reality yet another infighting dispute among the different groups of the ruling coalition.

Some groups insist land must be distributed, as promised, while other underline that private property and the rules of the game must be respected if Uruguay is to keep receiving investments. To this must be added a local ingredient: the Governor of Artigas, Patricia Ayala who belongs to the ruling coalition has seen her standing in the public opinion polls plunge.

Meanwhile the Uruguayan Treasury is having to pay the bill of the dispute: most of the so called ‘shaggies” and belonging to the government bio-fuel project to boost sugar cane plantation in small farms or cooperatives have been incorporated as government employees.

Now apparently they are also pressing for plots of land.