Social movements amidst democratic transitions: Lessons from the Brazilian countryside

Social Movements amidst Democratic Transitions: Lessons from the Brazilian

Countryside

PETER P. HOUTZAGER

Democratic transitions represent unique opportunities in which movements of the poor can coalesce, place their demands on the national agenda, and institutionalise their access to authoritative decision-making centres. The opportunities and constraints movements of the poor face during transitions, however, remain little understood and under-theorised. This study develops an analytic approach that links national-level democratisation processes to the local-level movement dynamics that make collective action possible, particularly the creation and reproduction of collective identities and organisational structures. The approach theorises how changing elite alliance patterns during transition cycles, and redefinition of institutional linkages that bind state and society, shape the opportunities and constraints movements face at successive stages of democratic transitions. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by examining the new unionism in rural Brazil, in that country's democratic transition during the 1980s.

I. INTRODUCTION

A growing body of research in development studies is tackling nettlesome questions about the role of civil society and movements of the poor in development. This article explores one of these questions. What impact do transitions to democracy have on the ability of movements of the poor to place their demands on the national political agenda and influence society's authoritative decision-making centres? Democratic transitions occur when political elites, often in response to the actions of non-elite actors, contest

Peter P. Houtzager, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. The author expresses his appreciation for insightful comments made by David Collier, Lyla Mehta, Mick Moore, Pierre Ostiguy, Kenneth Shadlen, David Stuligross, and an anonymous reviewer. Special thanks to Ezinda S. Franklin for her keen editorial eye.

The Journal of Development Studies, Vo1.36, No.5, June 2000, pp.59-88 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

6O THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIESand renegotiate national political alliances and the institutions that regulate political conflict. Transitions therefore offer new opportunities for ,social movements to forge alliances with elite actors, join broad coalitions that incorporate their demands, and gain access to decision-making centres. These demands and access may become institutionalised in the new political arrangements forged to consolidate democratic politics in the final phase of the transitions. The decline of many movements during this final phase in the recent wave of democratic transitions that swept through various regions of the world, however, reveals that movements face significant constraints during transitions as well. Their decline has also exposed the fact that we do not have a good theory of the complex relationship between social movements and regime change. Such a theory should highlight the opportunities and constraints movements face during these tumultuous and decisive political moments.

The extensive literature on the contribution of social movements to the restoration of civilian rule, and broader processes of democratisation, offers only a partial theory. This literature has by-and-large failed to address the root causes of movement decline and the constraints movements face during transitions. Paradoxically, decline is often attributed to the institutionalisation of democratic politics, the examples of West European and North American movements notwithstanding. Movements are seen as either losing their raison d'etre as democratic channels open or, because of their pursuit of autonomy and uncertain ties to political parties, as falling victim to co-optation by state agencies or marginalisation from decisionmaking centers altogether [Mainwaring, 1992; Foweraker, 1995; Schneider, 1992; Canel, 1992]. In instances where movements have close ties to parties, blame falls on the strategic choices of movement and party leaders to rein in contentious extra-institutional mobilisation and channel demandmaking into institutional channels of representation [O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986: 58-9; Hipsher, 1996: 273-97].1

This article takes a step toward theorising the relationship between the local-level movement dynamics that make collective action possible and national-level democratisation processes.2 It develops an approach that moves beyond recent theorising in this area, which has focused on the decisions of national-level movement leaders at successive stages of transitions, and how these are shaped by movement ties to political parties [Hipsher, 1998: 155]. The approach developed here looks beyond leadership decisions to carefully link national political change to the locallevel dynamics of constructing and reproducing collective identities and organisational structures that make collective action possible. It gives causal primacy to two national-level processes that characterise democratic transitions: (a) the renegotiations of elite political alliances that sustain

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AMIDST DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS: BRAZIL 61 regimes, and (b) the redefinition of institutional linkages that bind state and society. These two processes, the article suggests, play a central role in shaping the opportunities and constraints that movements of the poor confront during the successive stages of the transition. It pays special attention to how changes in movement allies and the institutional venues through which movements make claims affect collective identities and organisational structures.

This narrow focus on movements' relationships to elites and institutions cannot explain all movement behaviour in democratic transitions, nor account for all, or perhaps even most, of the great variation between movements. Movement trajectories are also shaped by internal movement dynamics and by cultural and other non-political factors. However, the approach suggested here, I argue, can explain critical elements of the relationship between social movements and regime change and offer a more complete picture of this relationship than previous work has. It also serves to bring political elites back into the analysis of social movements after a long hiatus.3

After a brief elaboration of the approach the rest of the article will analyse the new unionism movement in rural Brazil during that country's democratic transition (1979-89). The new unionism is a good test case of the analytic utility of this approach. The movement broadly followed a trajectory similar to that of many of the urban movements in the latest mobilisation wave that swept through Latin America and other regions of the world. The movement emerged unexpectedly at the beginning of the democratic transition in 1979, established itself as a national actor in the mid-1980s, and entered into sudden decline in the final moments of the transition, late in the 1980s. None of the partial movement theories can convincingly account for the new unionism's trajectory. Nor can they explain why the movement took on the particular substantive form that it did, and why this form changed over the course of the transition.

A radical movement of primarily poor small farmers, the new unionism defined itself as a progressive alternative to the state-supported, corporatist Rural Workers' Union Movement (MSTR). With vigorous support from the progressive-wing of the Catholic Church, it grew over the course of a decade from a handful of local unions nestled in the Amazon region into a national movement with over 320 unions and roughly 750,000 members.4 The most powerful labour and party organisations of the left to emerge in the transition - the Central Onica dos Trabalhadores (CUT) and the Workers' Party (PT) - embraced its demands. At the end of the 1980s, as Brazil ratified its .new democratic constitution and held its first direct presidential elections in 30 years, the movement entered into a profound crisis. The movement did not blindly pursue autonomy from other actors,

62 THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES but instead developed close ties to the CUT and the PT. It was not apolitical, with its `back to the state', but called for the radical transformation of society along socialist lines. Nor did the new unionism's links to the PT lead to its demobilisation. The party stood outside of the transition pact that ended authoritarian rule and did not seek to restrain `its' movements.

II. ARGUMENT

The development of the new unionism in Brazil's democratic transition was shaped foremost by (a) the shifting alliance between the state and the Catholic Church, and by (b) re-emergence of the left as an organised force in the CUT and PT. In the first phase of the transition (1979-84) the decisive ' factor in the movement's emergence was the rupture of the historic alliance between the Catholic Church and the state. In the wake of this rupture, the progressive wing of the church took on the role of `institutional host' for the new unionism. That is, during the late 1970s and early 1980s the church drew diverse rural groups into its organisational and ideological fields, then vigorously encouraged the development of the new unionism. The movement grew through the church's extensive organisational networks and forged a radical Catholic identity that closely aligned with the belief systems prevalent in rural communities. Church organisations even facilitated the movement's participation in the new alliances forming on the left in the CUT and PT.

In the second phase (1985-89) the basic changes in the national alliance structure that led to the reestablishment of civilian rule profoundly altered the new unionism's alliance possibilities. In particular, the church was reconciled with the state and retreated from its role as institutional host, and the left re-emerged as an organised and vigorous political force. These changes provoked a rupture between the new unionism and the church, and a strengthening of the unions's ties to the urban left in the CUT and PT. The shift in allies proved highly problematic for the movement, resulting in an irreplaceable loss of organisational resources and contributed to a secularisation of its identity, a process that alienated much of its mass base.

Institutional linkages that bound state and society in Brazil, particularly the corporatist labour relations system and the party system, critically influenced how the changing national political alliances affected the development of the new unionism. During the 1960s and 1970s the military government had extended corporatist labour institutions, including rural worker unions, to the countryside. This led to the emergence of a state-sponsored, and controlled, national rural workers union movement. A direct consequence of this new state-society linkage was the clergy's decision in the late 1970s to organise small farmers into a rival union movement and

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AMIDST DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS: BRAZIL 63 help construct a collective identity for the new unionism based on the legally sanctioned category `rural worker'. In the subsequent civilian-led regime, the party system grew significantly in importance and the new unionism responded to this development by concentrating increasingly on its ties to the Workers' Party.

III. APPROACH: ELITES AND INSTITUTIONS

The analytic hub of any effort to explain the behaviour and trajectory of social movements must be the relationship between movements and political elites. Movement claims are made on political elites, and elite response determines not only whether these demands are translated into policy, but also whether the movement is recognised as a legitimate actor and granted access to decision-making centers within the state [McAdam, 1982; McAdam et al., 1999]. Social movement theory has focused on two possible elite responses to movement claim making: opposition and efforts to build alliances. Elites, however, may also ignore movements (perhaps the most common response) or assume the role of an institutional host for them. Only movements that succeed in attracting influential allies or that are hosted are likely to develop into national political actors.

I introduce the new concept of institutional hosts to differentiate instances where elites go beyond the role of movement allies and in effect organise new actors and thereby seek to remake the political cleavages and re-orient political contestation. The difference between allies and hosts resides in both the quantitative and qualitative nature of their investments in social movements. Allies support existing movements in various ways, while hosts attempt to create new movements by drawing people into their organisational and ideological fields and redefining the bases of their `groupness'. Unlike allies, hosts contribute in a critical way to the social networks, organisational resources; and ideological frameworks needed to overcome the formidable obstacles to collective action. As a consequence hosts have greater impact on movements' substantive form than allies have - that is, on the collective identities and organisation.5

A significant body of research has demonstrated that the renegotiation of national-level political alliances that takes place as part of democratic transitions has a profound impact on how movement-elite relations develop. This research suggests that the increase in infra-elite conflict that initiates transitions can create new opportunities for mobilisation and alliance building [Tarrow, 1994; Schneider, 1992, Navarro, 1994; Mainwaring, 1986b; O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986]. It may also lead to instances of institutional hosting. Movements, however, face different alliance or hosting possibilities at successive stages of transitions. Conventional

64 THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES analyses of movements amidst transitions focus on the decisions of national-level movement leaders at successive stages of democratic transitions [Hipsher, 1998].6

The approach developed here, in contrast, looks closely at how changes in allies affect in basic ways whether movements will be able to reproduce their collective identities and organisational structures at the local level, and how they will do so. As elites and non-elite actors attempt to consolidate new alliances and democratic institutions, movements experience a bewildering array of changes, including the retreat of former allies from involvement in popular mobilisation and the emergence of new non-elite actors as viable allies. Movement decline in this new context can take a variety of forms, depending on the nature of movement-party ties and the role of the party (or other allies) in the transition process.

In the case of the new unionism in Brazil, I argue, attention to the locallevel dynamics of collective action reveals that it was the retreat of the Catholic Church from its role as an institutional host and the marginal position of the PT in the final stages of the transition that altered the movement's identity and significantly eroded its organisational capacity. Demobilisation was not the result of strategic choices made by movement leaders, nor the result of autonomy from political parties as some partial theories suggest, but instead it was the consequence of the rapid erosion of mobilisational capacity.7

Movement-elite relations are shaped in various ways by the institutions that link state and society. These institutional linkages in effect limit elite contestation and help establish what forms of contestation are acceptable [Skocpol, 1992; Fox, 1996; McAdam et al., 1999].8 Studies of social movements have tended to focus on the `degree of openness' of political institutions to movement demands, particularly party systems (level of party competition) [Kitschelt, 1986], structure of the state (separation of powers, and whether federal or unitary) [Banaszak, 1996; Kriesi et al., 1995], and the `state's propensity for repression' [McAdam, 1996: 27].

The approach developed here has a different focus. It examines the impact of two types of state-society linkages on movement dynamics. These are political linkages (such as the party system) and structural linkages, which include the systems of labour relations, social welfare, and land tenure.9 On the one hand, the approach suggests that social movements seek to lower their costs of collective action and increase their likelihood of success by mobilising around structural linkages, seeking to politicise them.10 Structural linkages therefore shape the claims around which movements organise. These linkages often remain unchanged during regime transitions [Houtzager and Kurtz, forthcoming]. On the other hand, the approach suggests that different political linkages alter the costs and

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AMIDST DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS: BRAZIL 65 likelihood of success of pursuing particular strategies for both elite actors and movements. They therefore shape how movements organise and press their demands. The institutional change that is part-and-parcel of regime transitions therefore alters the playing field in which movements mobilise and affects their identities, organisation and strategies.

IV. ELITE CONFLICT IN THE COUNTRYSIDE: CHURCH AND STATE

The pivotal event in the development of the new unionism was the rupture of the historic alliance between the Brazilian Catholic Church and the state during the 1970s. The alliance between the Catholic Church and the state in Brazil originated in the colonial period and, with the exception of a 40-year hiatus in the First Republic (1889-1930), lasted into the 1960s. Weaker than the churches elsewhere in Latin America, the Brazilian Catholic Church depended on the state to guarantee it's religious monopoly and support a broad array of religious institutions.11 The hierarchy of the Catholic Church originally supported the military coup of 1964 but when the military hardline won control over the state in 1968 the clergy reversed itself. The closure of the political regime and a deepening institutional crisis of the Brazilian church, as it struggled to adjust to an increasingly urban and secular society, pushed clergy as a whole to embrace changes being proposed by a progressive minority within the church [Mainwaring, 1986a and 1986b; Cava, 1989; Bruneau, 1985].

The changes emerged out of the reorientation of the international Church following Vatican II (1962-65) and of the Latin American Episcopate after the regional gathering in Medellfn (1968). The bishops in Medellfn in particular advocated the reversal of longstanding conservative political alliances and religious practice to make what became known as the `option for the poor.' The church, Latin America's bishops announced, needed to bring itself closer to the masses and become a voice for social justice, a voice for the voiceless [Levine, 1986; Mainwaring and Wilde, 1989; Hewitt, 1991: 19-24]. In Brazil this entailed a dramatic effort to redefine the church's relationship with society and, as the church distanced itself from the authoritarian regime, the clergy launched an unprecedented popular organising campaign. According to Mainwaring [1986a: 105] the Brazilian church in the succeeding decade became the most progressive in the world and the principal opposition force to the authoritarian regime as virtually all political channels were shut.

The Brazilian clergy responded particularly strongly to the military hardliners' agrarian project. During the 1970s the military sought to induce the modernisation of agriculture, national integration of `unoccupied' territories (particularly of the Amazon region), and incorporation of `rural

66 THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES workers' into a state-regulated union movement. The policies varied by region, but cumulatively they led to a marked expansion of capitalist agriculture and of the national state's presence in rural areas [Goodman, 1986; Houtzager, 1998; Sorj, 1980]. The church challenged what it saw as the central tenet of the project - the state-led expansion of capitalism. In 1973, Bishops from the Amazon region concluded that `capitalism is the great evil, the rotten root, the tree that produces those fruits we all know: poverty, hunger, sickness, and death of the majority.'12 The bishop of the Amazon state of Acre, echoing Kautsky's analysis in the Agrarian Question, added that land conflict `characterises the forms through which capitalism penetrates and appropriates itself of agriculture ... such conflicts are perfectly adequate to the necessity of the concentration of land - the basic means of production in agriculture - without which capitalist accumulation in the countryside would become impossible' [CNBB, 1976: 188-9, quote on 6].

This new stance helped revolutionise the church's pastoral work [Martins, 1994: 137]. It was henceforth governed by the need to build `a new society that supersedes capitalism'. The Church demanded profound agrarian reform and made land itself sacred, a condition for liberty and affirmation of one's humanity [Poletto, 1985: 135].13 The Church's historic emphasis on community was reformulated to incorporate a `theology of land', placing non-capitalist use of land at the centre of rural community. Pastoral practice itself changed in two basic ways. First, progressive clergy sought to raise people to a new critical consciousness about the world and their position in it through the `consciousness raising' pedagogy first developed by Paulo Freire in the 1960s. Perhaps more accurately, pastoral agents sought to relieve people of their false-consciousness and convert them to a radical political-religious identity inspired by Liberation Theology [Grzybowsk, 1987: 65-71 ]. Second, clergy sought to organise people - in Christian Base Communities (CEBs) and other local organisations - to participate in their own salvation by taking on various religious tasks, community self-help projects, and struggles for their rights as citizens. These new pastoral practices led to an unprecedented organising drive and a marked expansion of the Church's organisational presence in rural areas.

The most important Church entity to emerge out of this pastoral revolution in rural areas was the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), created in 1975. It would go on to play a critical role in the emergence of the new unionism. The Bishops conceived the CPT as a service to support smallscale family farmers in their economic and political struggles, whether they had legal possession of the land or not. The entity was to organise the `victims of the unjust distribution and ownership of land', defend their legal

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AMIDST DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS: BRAZIL 67 rights, and `dynamise' and coordinate their struggles. In the 1980s, as the transition proceeded, the CPT expanded its role to include stimulating rural community members' political participation. Formed originally in response to the alarming increase in violent land conflict in the Amazon, the CPT quickly expanded southward. By 1979 it had 15 regional offices and reached all the way down to Brazil's border with Argentina [CNBB, 1980: 4; CPT, 19761.14

The CPT concentrated in particular on renovating the leadership of the corporatist MSTR that had emerged over the course of the 1960s and 1970s with state support. In the pre-1964 period the `old' left - the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB) and the Catholic radicals of Catholic Action - had begun to make advances in rural organising and created a limited number of rural worker unions. The old left, however, had been eliminated as an organised force in the countryside with the coup. The MSTR that emerged under state tutelage had a moderate-reformist national leadership but the bulk of its rural unions were engaged primarily in delivering social services on behalf of the state and/or were politically conservative.15 Efforts by the new Catholic radicals of the 1970s, inspired by Liberation Theology, to turn the rural worker unions into more representative and combative labour organisations met with little success.

In the late 1970s, however, the People's Church's involvement in rural organising increased markedly and changed qualitatively. The controlled political opening initiated from above by the military (abertura) in 1979, and the rising tide of opposition voices, and particularly the emergence of the urban new unionism with the strike wave of 1978-79, created a dramatically new political environment. The urban mobilisation had a powerful diffusion effect and launched a vigorous debate on the left about how to build a popular, mass-based political movement to oust the military and lead Brazil down an alternative developmental path. The People's Church occupied a unique position in the countryside at that moment. It was the only progressive actor with national reach.

V. THE CHURCH AS INSTITUTIONAL HOST

In this context of heightened political contestation progressive sectors of the church escalated their role in rural organising and took on the role of institutional host for the new unionism. It was a role for which it was particularly well suited. The church is a transnational institution with firm roots in rural communities. On the one hand, it could garner critical resources, information, and political support from abroad. On the other hand, it was a local actor represented by the Bishop, the parish priest and local pastoral agents (other clergy and Catholic lay activists). The church

68 THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES could mobilise rural social groups and local resources through its community networks and religious beliefs. Its myriad pastoral programmes, the CPT and other church entities, could link community leaders and activists to each other and to the national movements of the left emerging in the transition. Indeed, the church's efforts to create community leadership to `bring the Church to the people' produced most of the movement's leaders. The religious content of its organising initiatives resonated with the prevailing belief system in rural communities and allayed the fears of community members of being labeled communists and agitators by local authorities and the military. Religion conferred a degree of legitimacy and provided some level of protection from repression.16

If the political opening provided new opportunities for more political forms of organising and for mass mobilisation, the church's organising work among small farmers was none the less shaped in basic ways by the institutional linkages the military had forged between rural labour and the state in the previous decade. Progressive clergy saw the legally sanctioned and state-supported rural worker unions, and the existing labour-relations framework, as the legitimate channel for popular representation. Under the military's .agrarian project the corporatist labour regime that regulated urban labour was effectively extended to `rural workers', a legal category which included rural wage labourers as well as small farmers in various forms of land tenure arrangements (sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and capitalised small farmers, and so forth). The new rural labour regime led to the emergence of the first rural movement of national scope in Brazilian history. This corporatist movement, known as the Rural Workers' Union Movement (MSTR) was led by the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) and grew from a few hundred rural unions in 1964 to 2,275 (and 21 state-level federations). By 1979 it encompassed an estimated 6.1 million members. However, the unions were heavily dependent on the state and a majority had become pseudo-state agencies, often tied to the local power structure, and concentrated on delivering social services or administrative tasks on behalf of the state.17

Progressive clergy sponsored the formation of union opposition movements to oust the sitting union directorates. These union oppositions would form the new unionism. Winning control over the local rural workers' unions, however, was seen as only the first in a series of political battles. The opposition movements sought not only to renovate the leadership of existing unions, but also to help rebuild the left and lead a radical transformation of Brazilian society from below. The union was therefore a legally sanctioned, institutional space from which to challenge local elites and the state, and to assert the political presence of rural workers in the democratic transition.18 The choice to use rural unions to enhance both

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AMIDST DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS: BRAZIL 69 small farmers' representation vis-a-vis the state and their political voice stemmed from both the Church's continued legalism and the political realities of organising during a period of military rule. Alluding to the possibility of state repression, a CPT document explains `we cannot forget that the greatest risk is to want to find alternatives on the margins of [existing] legislation because those who want to repress the peasant find in this type of initiative the best justification for their actions' [CPT-Pard, 1976: 11 ]. Pastoral agents strongly encouraged people to participate in union affairs and assert control over their `class instrument.' They provided technical and political support to strengthen unions vis-a-vis the state and local landowning elites.

Central to the church's role as an institutional host for the new unionism was the ideological framework it provided. The ability of the church to pour new content into pre-existing identities was critical to the development of the opposition movements. Progressive clergy sought to convert Catholics, and community leaders in particular, to a new radical political-religious identity. This new identity was inclusionary, based on a mix of prophetic Catholicism and popularised Marxism. It defined the small farmers as part of the workers' movement that would occupy the new political space opened in the transition and transform Brazilian society from below.

Class, however, was defined not in conventional sociological terms, but as broadly as possible - that is, as the poor, the oppressed, and the working people, (which included fishermen, beggars, and industrial workers) who stood in direct opposition to the rich, the dominant class, or the capitalists. As Rothman observes, the CPT's conception of `the poor' rests on ethical and religious categories and, quoting one of the pastoral's principal thinkers, `opens a bridge between classes and social categories which different forms of production separate'.19 The ideal was the community of small farmers tilling the land either collectively or individually. The identity, therefore, was class-based, defined in religious-ethical terms, yet community oriented.20 It also held that faith led Christians to participate in the struggle for liberation from capitalist exploitation, and that the struggle was the execution of God's plan.21 The process by which the struggle was carried out was an important part of the identity, because the struggle itself was liberating and an expression of one's faith. Hence, there was a strong emphasis on popular participation and legitimate (autentico) workers' organisations. Importantly, there was a utopian and highly voluntaristic belief in the ability of `the people', o povo, to transform society through `conscious' action.

The oppositions were built on the local-level networks provided by Christian Base Communities (CEBs) and an array of religious community groups. The CEBs were an important new political space, which often lay

70 THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES beyond traditional patron-client relations. These religious networks made it possible to mobilise significant numbers of people.22 In rural areas the CEB, or the capela (chapel) in southern Brazil, was the centre of community life and the primary social space [Papma, 1992: 40-42]. It is therefore important to stress that the CEBs were first and foremost social and religious organisations that helped integrate rural communities. There was also great ideological variability between and within the communities. The degree of activism and political orientation of CEB members was often a function of the inclinations of the local priest or Bishop. Most scholarship on the Church stresses that CEB members participated in union and political activities out of a new political consciousness acquired through various group activities [Mainwaring, 1986b; Levine, 1986, 1992; Mainwaring and Wilde, 1989; Scherer-Warren, 1993; Telles, 1987]. True as this may have been for many people, there was also a strong coercive element built into the Church's popular organising drive. As Diomo [1995: 144-5] points out in her study of urban movements in Brazil, religious-based appeals made participation in popular movements a duty. Failure to participate was a sin.

The church was also critical in overcoming the formidable hurdle of forming the movements' leadership. One of the organising principles of the People's Church was to create a local lay leadership that could help bring the church to the people. These leaders were alternatively selected by the parish priest or the community, and then trained to perform basic religious duties. Community leaders co-ordinated a variety of religious and social activities. They also helped disseminate the new form of Catholicism learnt through the church's pastoral programmes, such as the Rural Youth Pastoral and the Catechism Pastoral. Community activities helped create a pool of local leaders with organising experience and who were firmly embedded in local social networks and enjoyed strong community support. Religious agents could select the most promising of these new leaders to train for greater involvement in the opposition movements and further political activism. The overwhelming majority of the movement's leaders were recruited by the CPT and local pastoral programmes. In the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, for example, the Rural Youth Pastoral trained close to 700 youths with demonstrated leadership skills between 1982 to 1987. A training booklet told the Catholic youth:

At the moment that the union movement seeks to renovate itself the presence of the youth acquires enormous importance to speed up and guarantee this transformation ... The youth active in the Pastoral must find there a fertile terrain to assume his mission in civil society from his faith in Jesus Christ. The union is an indispensable instrument for the youth to develop its militancy and mature its consciousness for

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AMIDST DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS: BRAZIL 71

more political struggles in society as a whole. We can affirm that the Christian youth who is not active in the union struggle has not discovered his role as a Christian in this historic moment [Pastoral da Juventude Rural, 1985: 8].

The importance of the formal structures of the Church, and the support of progressive Bishops, cannot be underestimated. The Church's pastoral programmes, the CPT, and other Catholic entities functioned as linking structures through which religious agents recruited community leaders, and through which movement leaders maintained ties to their base. The pastoral programmes and CPT also worked to bring different union oppositions together to discuss regional issues, and to connect them to national movements, including the urban unions in Sao Paulo, who played a central role in forming the CUT and the Workers Party. Progressive Bishops appear to have avoided most forms of direct involvement in popular movements, but they actively legitimised popular organising work, encouraging participation, and intervened with authorities to protect pastoral agents and movement activists from repression.

One important mechanism for this was the land pilgrimage. Usually organised by the CPT, land pilgrimages were one-day political-religious demonstrations that encourage people to join the popular struggle through a mix of religious ritual and political discourse and put local elites on notice. In the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, for example, these were annual rituals organised around such themes as `The People United Will Never be Defeated' (1982) and `Land of God, Land of Brothers' (1986), and drew between twenty and sixty thousand people [CPT, 1995]. This mobilisational repertoire became common in many states during the 1980s, including in highly developed states such as Sao Paulo and frontier states such as Maranhao (in the centre-west of Brazil). Bishops also exercised varying degrees of control over pastoral programmes, a linchpin in the movements' infrastructure. The CPT, for example, flourished in progressive dioceses, where it could draw on the diocesan pastoral programmes and progressive priests, but faced serious difficulties in dioceses headed by conservative Bishops, who refused to sanction its work [Grzybowski, 1985: 257].

The Catholic Church, as a transnational institution, was also in a unique position to secure the financial resources which supported movements directly, and indirectly by funding much of the People's Church. Although a substantial portion of the movements' resources came directly from their participants, critical resources came from abroad in the form of international co-operation projects. The institutional church, and bishops in particular, played an irreplaceable role in securing these financial resources. Bishops often mediated contacts with foreign ecumenical, Catholic, or Protestant

72 THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES entities (primarily in Northern Europe), which funnelled millions of dollars into Brazil's rural and urban popular movements during the 1980s. A share of these monies went toward building the organisations of the People's Church. The CPT, for example, relied on projects of international cooperation for upward of 90 per cent of its budget. The same held true for many Catholic popular education institutes. Progressive dioceses, especially in the Amazon region, also relied heavily on external financial support to run their pastoral programmes.23

A substantial number of Catholic-based non-governmental organisations were deeply involved in popular organising in both rural and urban areas, and provided vital intellectual guidance and material support to the opposition's movements. These entities played an important intellectual and pedagogical role. They formulated positions on major substantive political issues, produced popular education materials used to raise people's political consciousness and to organise movements, and also linked movements across disparate regions. Diomo notes that church-supported popular education centers and community-oriented entities proliferated during the 1970s. The new organisations, part of the church initiative to decentralise activities and expand the role of laity, were emancipated from direct church control but remained connected to each other organically through interpersonal ties, reinforced by successive regional and national gatherings. The growth of NGOs was made possible by international donor support, which increased in volume and, in an effort to strengthen civil society, was given directly to numerous small civil organisations rather than channelled through state agencies as had been common practice [Diomo, 1995: 83-4].

The case of the Corrente Sindical de Lavradores Unidos (United Tiller's Union Current), one of Brazil's most organisationally and politically sophisticated opposition movements, is illustrative of this process. The movement emerged in the sprawling and sparsely populated county of Santarem, in the Amazon state of Para. The military had sought to integrate the region, and its presumed wealth, into the national economy since the late 1960s. Santarem nonetheless remained in splendid isolation both geographically and economically. When Corrente members traveled to Sao Paulo in the early 1980s to participate in various national labour congresses the trip took almost six days, one-way. In economic terms, the region remained marginal - the state of Para contributed only three per cent of the national agricultural GDP in 1980, and Santarem accounted for only three per cent of that. In the Corrente's immediate area of influence, the Medio Amazonas Paraense, the labour force was predominately subsistence-level small farmers (86 per cent), over half of whom did not have legal title to the land they worked. Agriculture was primitive and 60 per cent of families lived near or below the poverty line.24


The Corrente was formed in 1979 by two seminarians, local Catholic militants, and the local branch of the Catholic-based NGO, Federation of Agencies for Social and Educational Assistance (FASE). It was built on top of the elaborate network of Catholic community groups coordinated through the Rural Catechism Pastoral. The Catechism Pastoral built an impressive network of catechism groups (de facto CEBs) that by 1979 had 3,356 catechists working in 617 rural communities [Diocese de Santarem, 1980: 36]. Along with FASE the pastorate trained community leaders to organise religious services and coordinated community projects.25 Community leaders from all over the region gathered during special catechism weeks for an elementary religious and political training that included the new radical Catholic identity. The catechism weeks also provided these leaders an invaluable opportunity to meet and trade information. After 1979 progressive clergy went a step further and organised courses at the community, parish, and diocese levels to train community and movement activists. Promising community leaders were sent off to participate in specialised courses for community organisers, union activists, and political activists at the Regional Pastoral Institute in the state capital, Belem.

The Bishop of Santarem supported the Corrente's work and provided the movement a degree of legitimacy and political protection, as well as more practical help. The Diocese's Catholic Radio, for example, was used to announce meetings and to warn activists of troop movements. The Bishop's support was especially significant because Santarem was a national security zone with a heavy military presence. FASE, an autonomous organisation of church origins, provided the intellectual leadership of the movement, along with two seminarists, and critical organisational infrastructure and resources [Leroy, 1991: 51-2]. FASE brought invaluable organising experience to the region, acquired in the Northeast of Brazil during the pre-coup organising drive, and organisational infrastructure. Funding from abroad, through projects of international cooperation, was a key resource, and FASE was a vital link to the outside world. Discussing the movement, the director of FASE-Belem observed that `international cooperation was of decisive significance in this movement; it would not have been built without it, in no way'.26 Not only did the Corrente obtain several externally funded projects, FASE itself was financed almost entirely by West European donor organisations.27 IPAR in Beldm, and other church entities relied heavily on external funding as well.28

The CPT and FASE's network of contacts made it possible for the Corrente to overcome formidable obstacles created by the vast distances and precarious physical infrastructure of the Amazon region to establish close ties with various regional and national movements emerging on the

74 THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES left. The movement learnt of the strike wave of 1978-79 in Sao Paulo's industrial heartland virtually as it occurred. The urban strikes had a profound impact and the Corrente entered into contact with the Metalworkers Opposition of Sao Paulo as early as 1979, and a little later with the Sao Bernardo and Diadema union headed by Lufs 1nacio `Lula' da Silva. When the 1980 union election in Santarem drew near, urban workers from Sao Paulo travelled north to help train the Corrente's activists on how to organise for and monitor union elections.29 The Corrente won control over the union in 1980 and at its height the movement had 265 locals (delegacias sindicais) and an estimated 12,000 members [Leroy, 1991: 96]. By the mid-1980s the Corrente had overcome the isolation of the lowerAmazon region to become a regional political force. It participated in the frenzied process of institution building that led to the formation of the CUT and the Workers' Party in Para and even at the national level.30

VI. NEW ALLIANCES: NEW UNIONISM, CENTRAL UNICA DOS

TRABALHADORES AND WORKERS' PARTY

The second phase of the transition was inaugurated in 1985 with the restoration of civilian rule and was accompanied by basic changes in the national alliance patterns and political institutions. These changes contributed significantly to the rupture of the new unionism's ties to the Catholic Church and its deep involvement in the CUT and PT. On the one hand, the Church shifted to a more conservative position as the transition progressed and retreated from its role of institutional host. On the other hand, the secular left in the Workers' Party and CUT emerged as a viable ally. The church-sponsored union oppositions had from their inception defined themselves as part of a national workers' movement and, as a result of this identity and the extensive organisational network of the church, participated in the process that led to the creation of the Workers' Party and CUT. This involvement was a desired outcome of the organising work undertaken by the People's Church but ultimately contributed to the break between the movement and the church. One of the consequences of these changes in alliances was the secularisation of the new unionism's identity and its increasing involvement in electoral politics.

The CUT and Workers' Party acquired national stature around 1985 and were critical in projecting the rural new unionism onto the national political stage.31 The CUT and the Workers' Party shared a common political project during most of the 1980s and the peasant-worker alliance was an important and integral part of this project. Both entities embraced key agrarian issues such as radical agrarian reform under the control of the workers, agricultural policy favoring small farmers, and parity of rural workers' social benefits

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AMIDST DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS: BRAZIL 75 with those of urban workers. The CUT and Workers' Party advocated a form of democratic socialism, arguing that true democracy could only be achieved in a socialist society. Rejecting any particular orthodoxy, this transformation would occur through the day-to-day struggles of the working class in its various forms - strikes, popular mobilisations, electoral campaigns, etc. - which would build workers' consciousness and power in society. The transformative (if not revolutionary) and secular identity propagated was not universally accepted within either the CUT or the Workers' Party, which both encompassed a diverse membership.32 For the majority of rural unionists, however, it melded easily with the earlier Liberation Theology-inspired identity and was readily assimilated. The Liberation Theology idea of the struggle for liberation between os pequenos and os grandes (the `small' and the `big') was replaced with the more conventional class-struggle between the `economic, political, and ideological projects' of the `the working class' and the `bourgeoisie'. The workers' project was, of course, socialism, not the Kingdom of God.

The rural new unionism movement represented a significant numerical presence within CUT. The movement grew in every region of Brazil and by 1989 encompassed 242 unions (see Figure 1). It accounted for over a third of the total delegates at various of CUT's national labour congresses during the 1980s, a fact that has led one analyst to comment that the rural new unionism was one of four pillars on which the labour entity was built [Antunes, 1995: 63]. Numerous movement leaders participated in the process of establishing branches of CUT at the local, state, and national level, and the entity's vice-president from its foundation through the mid1990s was a rural worker leader from Santarem, The `rurals', as they became known in the predominately urban labour central, established a Rural Secretariat in 1985, which in 1989 became the National Rural Workers' Department as part of an internal reorganisation of the CUT.

FIGURE 1 CUT-AFFILIATED RURAL WORKER UNIONS BY REGION, 1989

Regions Unions Percentage South 56 23 Southeast 28 12 Centerwest 16 7 Northeast 95 39 North 47 19 Total 242 100

Note: Data derived from CUT-DESEP [1994].

76 THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Their large numbers notwithstanding, however, the `rurals' were in a congenitally precarious position in the urban labour central. Rural unionists had virtually no resources of their own and were mystified by the intense ideological disputes of the left. They expended considerable energy defending their right to remain in CUT. The majority of rural union members were small farmers (small holders, sharecroppers, or squatters).33 Their church-inspired identity as workers was contested by more conventional sectors of the left, who vociferously protested the inclusion of small farmers (even poor ones) in a working-class movement. The rurals' fragile position may have contributed to the militant stance its leaders adopted. The rurals' discomfort within the CUT was reflected in the official theme of the founding congress of the Rural Department in 1989, which was `unity in diversity'. The Department explained: `neither wage labourers are revolutionaries by nature and small holders conservative, nor, on the contrary are small holders anti-capitalists and wage labourers reformists. A class-based union strategy is one that builds the political unity of the exploited, without idealising or mystifying one or the other segment' [CUTDNTR, 1990: 17-18, 43].

The growing importance of the party system over the course of the 1980s had a significant impact on the new unionism. The new unionism's relationship to the Workers' Party grew stronger as the party system itself became a more important channel for building and exercising political power. The secularisation of the new unionism was undoubtedly reinforced by its growing involvement in the Workers' Party. Scholars usually define the Workers' Party as an urban party, but the union oppositions and other church-supported popular movements gave it a strong presence in a number of rural areas. In the 1980s the party defined itself as a mass-based socialist party that unites workers from the city and countryside.34 It stood outside of the political pact that had sealed the conservative transition, refusing to participate in the electoral college that elected the first post-military president in 1984, and four years later voted against the 1988 Constitution because it `institutionalised the bourgeois order' [Sader and Silverstein, 1991: 91 ]. Early on it set out that the road to socialism, and workers' path to power, required winning hegemony in society through both the mobilisation of workers and popular organisations and the parliamentary struggle. The mobilisation of popular movements was therefore a central part of its strategy. Substantial sectors within the party were in fact deeply ambivalent about pursuing an electoral strategy, arguing that neither the dominant classes nor the military would accept electoral victories by the party's candidates.

The party's relative success in the mayoral election of 1985 and the series of significant elections that followed - for Congress in 1986 (which

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AMIDST DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS: BRAZIL 77 would double as a Constitutional Assembly), municipal elections in 1988, and the presidential elections in 1989 - strengthened those within the party who favored the electoral option. This shift within the party after 1985 helped draw the rural new unionism into the electoral arena. Particularly after 1987, when the PT defined its electoral strategy for the upcoming municipal and presidential elections, the rural new unionism made electoral campaigns a priority. Between 1987 and 1989 the national leadership, precariously perched first in the Agrarian Secretariat and then in the Rural Department, spent much of its time preparing proposals for the 1988 Constituent Assembly (particularly a new agrarian law favoring small farmers) and for the impending popular government that the PT's victory in 1989 elections would inaugurate.

At the local level, the new unionism pursued what was essentially a polarisation strategy which sought to expose hidden class conflict by clearly demarcating two camps - the exploited and the exploiters. As intended, the strategy split entire rural communities into two camps - pro- and antiWorkers' Party. Rural movements in the late 1980s would elect a small but significant number of candidates on the PT's slate to local political office, and in a few instances to state assemblies and the national Congress. The municipal elections of 1988 marked the first time that the party had a significant presence in rural areas. Keck observes that `an estimated 40 per cent of the [party's] municipal council members elected . . . were rural workers or worked with the Catholic land pastoral [CPT]' [Keck, 1992: 154, 157-60, quote on 157, 58-9, 62; Sader and Silverstein, 1991: 126; Martins, 1994].

In Para and the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, for example, the new unionism's involvement in the Workers' Party was extensive. In these two states the union and party were in fact one and the same. The church-trained activists saw the union and party as different fronts in a single popular struggle and failed to draw a sharp distinction between the roles of the two. The results for the party were significant. Members of the Corrente in Santarem joined the national executive committee of the party in 1981, headed the local PT branch, and were subsequently elected to the state assembly of Para, and later to the national Congress.35 In 1988 the PT elected 39 local council members in the state of Para: 2 in the state-capital and 37 in predominantly rural counties. That same year in Rio Grande do Sul rural unions elected 17 of their leaders as council members. In the first round of presidential elections in 1989 the PT's candidate in that state averaged almost 15 per cent of the vote in the 18 counties where the new unionism controlled the local union. This contrasts with the 6.4 per cent won in the state capital Porto Alegre. Figure 2 shows the PT's support in three predominantly rural counties of Rio Grande do Sul (where the oppositions won control of unions), the mid-size city of Erechim, and the state capital Porto Alegre.


FIGURE 2 WORKERS' PARTY ELECTORAL RESULTS IN SELECTED COUNTIES

OF RIO GRANDE DO SUL (Percentage of total ballots cast)

1982 1986 1989 19901

County Governor Federal Governor Federal President Governor Federal

Deputies Deputies 1st round 1st round Deputies Aratiba2 0.0 0.0 13.8 16.3 44.7 33.6 35.1 Jacutinga 0.1 0.1 8.0 11.6 18.6 14.2 15.9 Erval Grande 0.0 0.0 12.6 13.5 24.0 15.9 16.2 Erechim3 2.3 2.2 5.5 6.6 9.4 7,8 11.3 Porto Alegre 3.9 3.3 12.6 14.6 6.4 10.6 10.8 Rio Grande do Sul 1.3 1.1 5.3 6.6 6.5 7.9 6.6

Notes:1Results for the Frente Popular, an electoral coalition made up of the Workers' Party, PSB, and

PCB. The PSB and PCB, however, had virtually no presence in rural areas in Rio Grande do Sul. 2The high level of support for the party in Aratiba in part reflects the strength of the popular movement CRAB, which grew out of the CPT's organising work and had close ties to the new unionism. 3The urban population of Erechim was 86 per cent of the total in 1991. IBGE [1991].

VII. RETREAT OF THE CHURCH

Even as the new unionism was drawn into the orbit of the CUT and PT, the progressive coalition assembled within the Church during the 1970s began to unravel and its involvement in popular movements declined. On the one hand, the end of authoritarian rule, and of the developmentalist pattern of state intervention in the countryside, eliminated the principal point of conflict between church and state. On the other hand, the growing conservatism of the international church strengthened conservative sectors within the Brazilian church. Starting in 1979 the Vatican's stance towards liberation theology grew progressively more hostile. It appointed a substantial number of conservative bishops in Brazil and censured more radical clergy. The conservative appointments had an important impact on the new unionism because Bishops exercise considerable influence over pastoral programmes, a critical component of the movement's organisational structure.

Although the re-establishment of the church-state alliance of the pre1964 period did not come to pass, the direct confrontation that characterised much of the 1970s and early 1980s ended. Moderate sectors of the church, a large majority in the Brazilian church, argued that with the reappearance of other social actors in the transition and the end of state persecution, the

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AMIDST DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS: BRAZIL 79 church no longer needed to be the `voice for the voiceless'. Indeed, continuing to play this role threatened the institutional integrity of the church itself. Neo-conservative sectors, long opposed to the activist People's Church, gained ground within the Brazilian church during the 1980s with the conservative shift of the international church under John Paul II.

Members of the People's Church were themselves in a state of confusion over their role in the new political context. The clergy's totalising role in the union opposition movements was challenged by other political actors and by the movements themselves. As Burdick [1993: 211 ] and Grzybowski [1987: 272-3] note, the church's tendency was to abandon movements it could not dominate. Its highly political work in the 1980s had also trained a generation of Catholic activists many of whom eventually left the Church. Finally, its politicised religiosity had alienated more traditional Catholics and failed to halt the advance of evangelical sects among the poor. The CPT suffered declining support from the church hierarchy and had difficulty redefining its relationship to the new unionism. It continued to defend rural workers rights and collect data on rural violence as before, but it shifted its attention to movements such as the Movement of the Landless (MST), and engaged increasingly in partisan activity in favour of the Workers' Party [Martins, 1994: 145-6, 163]. VIII. DEMOCRACY AND DECLINE

In the final years of the 1980s, as the country prepared for a new democratic constitution and organised for the first direct presidential elections since 1960, the new unionism entered into crisis. The movement grew isolated in the rural communities, lost key parts of its local organisation, faced an acute financial crisis, and proved unable to reproduce its leadership. The break with the church, the growing secularisation of the movement, and its increasing involvement in the party system all contributed to the crisis [CEDI, 1989, 1990; Faleiros, 1994; Movimento dos Sem Terra, 1989; von der Weid, 1993; CESE, 1994].

The secularisation of the movement led to the distancing of its identity from the set of beliefs held by most rural community members, who remained devoutly Catholic and suspicious of the secular left. For the same reason, its close identification with the Workers' Party was also viewed with distrust. The secularisation of identity represented a significant shift from one that was broad and inclusionary, to one that was exclusionary and built on narrow ideological grounds, in which only those fully committed to a socialist transformation belonged. Although the transformative or revolutionary aspirations of the original radical Catholic identity remained, and the goal continued to be to build a workers' movement that could lead

i


a radical transformation of society, now the transformation was conceived as socialist, the protagonist was the working-class (defined in conventional sociological, and therefore more exclusionary, terms), and the enemy was the bourgeoisie. One member of the Corrente observed that `things reached the absurd level here that union militants would say that going to Church and praying was nonsense. That God did not exist.36

The secular and militant discourse stood in contrast to the social reality of most rural communities and, in the context of the nascent democratic regime, lost much of its appeal.37 It was reinforced by the unions' close ties to the Workers' Party. The party's support in rural areas was significant but nonetheless largely restricted to the loyal base built primarily by the People's Church. Its more militant declarations about the democratic transition and authoritarian nature of the new civilian government, whatever their merit, did little to remedy this.38 The leadership itself would suffer a profound identity crisis at the end of the 1980s with the collapse of the East Block (and with it the hope of reforming `real socialism'), the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and then the defeat of the Workers' Party candidate for president in 1989.

The break with the Catholic Church created serious organisational problems. These included the inability to reproduce the movement's leadership, the loss of the local networks out of which the movement had first emerged, and the loss of vital resources. The extensive effort to train an indigenous leadership and the elaborate organisational infrastructure of the Church had been a decisive factor in the new unionism's rapid growth. Without the Church's intensive efforts, the leadership that in the political opening had been recruited and trained through the pastorals could not be replaced. The CUT union schools, of which there were eight by 1988 (along with smaller regional schools), did not recruit or train community-level leaders, but instead provided existing leadership with a more sophisticated ideological training. Hence, as movement leaders participated in the unprecedented process of institution-building in the 1980s, and rose to various regional, state, and national CUT and Workers' Party offices, little was being done to replace them.

The break with the Church also contributed to the financial crisis of the new unionism. The movement's resource dependence on the church, and the funds it channeled from abroad, was high. It had not developed financial alternatives over the course of the 1980s and neither the CUT nor the Workers' Party had comparable resources to invest in rural areas. A rare survey of 12 unions attending a meeting of the union federation of Para in 1988 (presumably among the most dedicated), found that only two could afford to pay one or more of its union leaders, and who could therefore dedicate themselves full-time to the movement [FETAGRI-PAIAAM, 1988].

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AMIDST DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS: BRAZIL 81 IX. CONCLUSION

The opportunities and constraints that movements of the poor face during democratic transitions remains little understood and under-theorised. The approach taken in this study represents a first step in constructing an analytic framework through which to view the shifting relationship between movements and transitions. It focuses the analytic eye on how the changing elite alliance patterns in the transition cycle, and the accompanying institutional change, shape and reshape the collective identity and organisational bases of the movements, and either support or undermine the local level dynamics that sustain contentious forms of collective action. The study leaves little doubt that democratic transitions represent unique opportunities in which movements of the poor can coalesce and place their demands on the national political agenda. It also highlights, however, that movements highly dependent on the support of elite allies or institutional hosts are vulnerable in the final stages of democratic transitions.

The rural new unionism rose and fell with the shifting political tides of the democratic transition. It grew rapidly in the political opening initiated in 1979 with the decisive support of the People's Church, which had developed into the principle opposition to the military-led state during the 1970s. Both the collective identity and the organisational form the movement developed strongly reflected the influence of its religious host and state-society linkages. Only by understanding the impact of such linkages can we explain why, in the case of Brazil, many small farmers came to identify themselves as rural workers and fought for their place in Latin America's largest urban labour central, the CUT. The changing political alliances with the return of civilian rule in 1985, particularly the reconciliation between much of the church and state and the reemergence of the secular left in the CUT and PT, fundamentally altered the political environment of the new unionism. The movement's integration into the secular left and eventual break with the Catholic Church led to a redefinition of its identity, which alienated much of its rural base and created a set of organisational challenges it was poorly equipped to meet.39 These changes were exacerbated by the growing importance of the party system, which led rural unions to identify increasingly with the PT. By the end of the democratic transition the new unionism had descended into a profound crisis that threatened the very existence of the movement.

The general findings of this study are suggestive for urban movements but there is a caveat. Rural movements face greater obstacles to collective action than their urban counterparts. As a result, they may be more reliant than urban movements on favorable political conditions and the support of elite allies or institutional hosts. Rural movements must co-ordinate the

82 THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES collective action of people who are physically dispersed and reside in areas with precarious physical infrastructure.40 Furthermore, repression by local political elites, which substantially raises the cost of collective action, is often more severe in rural areas, particularly where the national state's ability to enforce the rule of law is tenuous. Finally, Migdal [1974: 222-4] has noted that one of the most difficult tasks rural movements face is the development of an indigenous leadership. Movements can rarely draw on a supply of experienced leaders and have difficulty holding on to the leadership they do develop.41 Hence further research is needed on a wider array of social movements in different national contexts in order to establish the general applicability of the approach developed here. A single case study provides a weak foundation on which to build a general theory linking social movements and political regimes but, the afore mentioned caveat notwithstanding, it can point towards critical causal mechanisms at play in this relationship.

Past research on social movements in low and middle-income countries has documented the important contribution movements make to democratisation. To understand the conditions under which social movements can continue to make this contribution scholars need to explore the opposite question. That is, how do national political regimes, and regime change in particular, influence the trajectory and substantive form of social movements. Study of the new unionism reveals that national alliance patterns and political institutions, often ignored in analyses of social movements, exert a tremendous influence on both the trajectories and substantive forms of social movements.

final version received October 1999

NOTES

1. Roberts [1995] argues that in Chile the reverse occurred: movement decline was tied to the

decline of the Chilean Communist Party. 2. This analytic approach is based in part on the political process approach in the social movement

literature. See McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly [in progress]; Tarrow [1994: 8]; Jenkins and Klandermans [1995]; McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald [1996]; Kriesi et al. [1995]; Banaszak [1996].

3. While American resource mobilisation and political process theorists paid careful attention to the role of political elites in the 1970s and 1980s, the literature on social movements in Latin America and other low and middle-income countries has largely ignored the impact of elites on movements.

4. This membership estimate is based on census data from 1988. The high number of rural unions reflects the labour law, which up until 1988 set the geographic base of unions at the municipio (county) level. IBGE [1988].

5. The idea of hosts suggests varying degrees of elite control over the hosted movement over time and implies that at some point the movement may leave its host, either by its own


volition or because of the elite actors' retreat from hosting. 6. Hipscher [1998: 150] for example suggests movement leaders will decide to demobilise, and

work through new institutional channels, in cases `where authoritarian elites still exercise a good deal of power and influence, where there is a close relationship between political parties and social movements, and where political elites have a strong commitment to stable ... democracy'.

7. This interpretation of movement decline therefore differs from that suggested by O'Donnell and Schmitter [1986], which focuses on how political parties rein in `their' movements in the final stages of transitions.

8. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly [in progress, Ch.6, 22/3/99: 15] for example, argue that `every regime sorts forms of organisation, publicly-asserted identities, and the forms of collective interaction along the continuum from prescribed to tolerated to forbidden ... [They] create procedures for public screening of acceptability in these regards; those procedures crystallise as laws, registers, surveillance, police practice, subsidies, organisations of public space, and repressive policies.'

9. Structural linkages mediate the productive, social, and regulatory functions of the state. 10. Although taking different approaches, several scholars explore how state structures can facilitate

collective action by subordinate social groups, including Skocpol [1992], Tendler [1997], and Fox [1996].

11. During the colonial period and the empire, the state not only subsidised the church but also appointed key church officials and exercised considerable control. The separation of church and state was established in constitutional law and practice during the First Republic (1889-1929), but reversed by Getulio Vargas in practice during the 1930s [Bruneau, 1982: 19-20].

12. 'Marginalization of a People,' quoted in Mainwaring [1986a: 93-1]. 13. The defining statement of the Church's position on land came in 1980 in CNBB [1980]. 14. Mainwaring has a useful analysis of the CPT's efforts to defend the legal rights of squatters in the

Amazon region. Mainwaring [1986a: 84-94]. 15. The MSTR did assert itself on the national stage after 1979 and played an important role in the

process leading to the creation of the labour centrals CUT and the General Workers' Confederation (CGT) and succeeded in organising labour campaigns for better wages in parts of the Northeast of Brazil, where it historically has had the most influence. It could not, however, mobilise the majority of its members and in most regions had limited influence.

16. The form of church involvement in popular movements outlined in this section was not unique to the new unionism or to rural areas. Diomo finds CEBs, archdioceses, and Catholic NGOs played a broadly similar role in a number of urban movements [Diomo, 1995: 95-7, Ch.4]. On the church's role in other rural movements, see Zander Navarro [1994: 129-54]; Rothman [1993: 145-80].

17. Among the important exceptions are the unions in Pernambuco's coastal sugarcane zone. See Pereira [1997]; Palmeira [1985]; Houtzager [1998]; Maybury-Lewis [1994].

18. The church's union opposition movements displayed a substantial degree of diversity. Some pursued a `basista' approach that emphasised community oriented transformative action and sought primarily to win control over local unions and gain a voice in local political affairs. Others were regional movements, some with national expression. This diversity reflected a split that developed within the People's Church over what role it should play in the political opening, and particularly in popular movements and in the party system. Early church work had a clearly `basista' bias and many pastoral agents saw political parties with distrust [Mainwaring, 1989: 173-6].

19. Jose de Souza Martins quoted in Rothman [1993: 175]. 20. The idea that religious agents created a political-religious identity in rural areas is drawn from

Regina Novaes, though she does not develop the concept [Novaes, 1985: 243-6; 1987: Ch.4]. See also Grzybowski [1987: 67-8].

21. Socialism was generally understood as a form of communitarianism. See CNBB Regional Norte 11 [1988].

84 THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES 22. The number of CEBs in Brazil remains a topic of debate, but estimates for the 1980s usually

place the number around 80,000, involving around two million people. The proportion located in rural areas, however, has not been researched [Novaes, 1987: 219-26]. See also Grzybowski [1987: 265-7]; Hewitt [1991: 6-10].

23. An estimated 40 per cent of religious agents in Brazil were foreigners at the time [Skidmore, 1989: 23]; Interview with Bishop Dom Erwin Krautler, 23 Jan. 1996, Altamira, Para.

24. The poverty line is defined as earning less than twice the minimum wage. Only two per cent of establishments in Santarem used either machinery or fertilisers and only one per cent belonged to co-operatives, an important means through which small farmers are integrated into the market in Brazil

25. Ninety-three per cent of Santarem's population that was Catholic [IBGE, 1983]. 26. Interview with Matheus Otterloo, 2 Feb. 1996, Belem. 27. Among the major contributors were the Dutch organisations, the Centrale Bemiddeling by

Medefinanciering Ontwikkelings Programma's (CEBEMO) and the Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation (ICCO), Exodus from Germany, Christian Aid from England.

28. Interview with Irma Maria Teodolinda Frigerio, 29 Jan. 1996, Be16m. 29. The video Maquinas Paradas a BraCos Crusados documenting the strikes found its way to Santarem

in 1979, and led, among other things, to the creation of a Women's Wing of the movement. Lula, as President of the Workers' Party, visited Santarem several times in the early 1980s. Interview of Ranulfo Peloso, taped for Grzybowski, no date; Leroy [1991: 94].

30. Interview with Avelino Ganzer, former President of the Santarem Rural Workers Union and former Vice-President of CUT, 23 Oct. 1995, Brasilia [Leroy, 1991: 108-9].

31. The PT was formed in 1979 and made the creation of CUT a part of its platform. CUT was founded in 1983 and established itself as the predominant labour organisation in 1985, in the wake of a series of impressive strikes in Brazil's industrial heartland, the ABC region of Sao Paulo. On the PT, see Keck [1992]; Sader and Silverstein [1991 ]; Lowy [1987]. On the CUT, see Rodrigues [1990]; Keck [1989]; Antunes [1995]; Giannotti and Neto [1990]; Mangabeira [1993].

32. CUT's Second Congress in 1986 explicitly affirmed its socialist aspirations and the Third, held in 1988, defined its conception of the union movement as `classista, de massa, democratico, de luta a pela base' (classist, mass-based, democratic, combative and organised at the grass-roots). This reflects the principal cleavage within the CUT during the 1980s, between those who saw the entity as primarily concerned with labour struggles within the existing economic model, and various left tendencies which saw it primarily as a force in the struggle against capitalism [Rodrigues, 1990: 9, 23, 86, 108-10; Keck 1992: 177].

33. In the 1988 CUT Congress, for example, 69 per cent of the rural delegates were small farmers and only eight per cent wage labourers (the remainder were landless, rubber tappers, etc.) [Antunes, 1995].

34. The democratic socialist label juxtaposes the PT to the parties of the former Communist countries, the social democrats of Western Europe, and the populist parties of Latin America [Sader and Silverstein, 1991: 104-7].

35. Valdir Ganzer, former leader of the Corrente and Congressman, current President of PT-Par'a, 2 Jan. 1996, Bel6m [Leroy, 1991: 170].

36. Interview with Paulo Medeiros, a local leader of the Corrente during the 1980s, 7 Jan. 1996, Uruara, Para; and with Valdir Ganzer, 2 Jan. 1996, Belem.

37. A number of people observe that the state in some regions also encouraged the formation of associations, in part as a strategy to undermine CUT unions [Navarro, 1994: 136, 140-41; von der Weid, 1993: 3, 6-7].

38. The party, for example, declared that it `rejects the bourgeois constitution [of 1988] that will be promulgated ... [and] rejects the immense majority of its laws which constitute the institutionalisation of the bourgeois order that the party seeks to destroy and, in its place, construct a socialist society' [Sader and Silverstein, 1991: 91 ].

39. Diomo [1995: Ch.4 esp. 106] similarly notes that in the urban movements she examined, the withdrawal of the Church and entry of political parties led to a marked decline in the number


of participants in the movements. In movements where the Church continued to invest, however, she observed a continued growth.

40. An exception to this characterisation are corporate peasant communities such as the ones for which Scott [1976] developed his moral economy approach. In these cases peasants do have considerable indigenous resources and are firmly embedded in local social networks.

41. Melucci [1996: Ch.] 7] and other social movement theorists have convincingly argued that movement leaders play a central role in forging collective identities and in establishing goals and strategies.

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