By Gabriela Moncau on May 3, 2023
MST occupies the offices Ferbasa
Tuesday morning the office of Companhia de Ferro das Ligas da Bahia (Ferbasa), a multi national corporation that operates in the areas of mining, eucalyptus production and metallurgy, was occupied by the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in the city of Maracás (BA).
In addition, this weekend before Labor Day, the movement occupied three large estates in Rio Grande do Norte and one in Bahia. According to the MST, all four areas were unproductive.
Occupations in Bahia
The action at Ferbasa’s headquarters comes after hundreds of families were evicted from an area of the company in the municipality of Planaltino (Bahia) on April 27. The peasants had been on the land since March 30, in what was the third attempt to build the Estrela Vive camp there. According to the MST, the area was abandoned before being converted into a place to live and plant food crops.
“The MST is occupying the office of Ferbasa to demand that there be a meeting of the company with Incra, the federal government and the state government to pacify this situation, since there is a 2017 agreement for this company to cede a number of hectares of land to settle families in the region and it was never fulfilled,” said Abraão Brito, political liaison of the MST in Chapada Diamantina.
In a note to Brasil de Fato, Ferbasa claimed that, “that it has maintained a dialogue with the MST, with the purpose of resolving the issue definitively. However, it is worth mentioning that the agrarian reform is a matter that involves several actors, among them the public power and the movement itself, reason why it cannot be solved in a timely and unilateral manner by Ferbasa”.
The company, which presents itself as the “only integrated producer of ferrochrome in the Americas”, also says that it rejects the occupation of its headquarters and that “negotiations should be maintained in a peaceful and orderly way”.
Also in the Chapada Diamantina region, but in the city of Boa Vista do Tupim (BA), 130 landless families occupied, at dawn on Fazenda Boa Esperança on April 29. “The area has been abandoned for 18 years and has an extension of 1,300 hectares of unproductive land.” says a note from the movement.
Source: Brazil de Fato, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English