How did you get involved in political action?
From the beginning? I have peasant origins, I was born in the countryside but as there is only school up until Primary, especially in the northeast of Brazil, I had to leave the countryside very young to go to study in the city. I joined the church and it was there that we formed a group of young people, and began to reflect on Liberation Theology and Paulo Freire. I was a nun at the time, and I was given the option of leaving the convent and going to work on the outskirts [low-income areas] with three other compañeras, who were also nuns.

It was then that we saw that the Church did not corres pond with what we wanted to struggle for. The Church was not the path we wanted to follow. In the Church we did have a degree of self-reflection, but only up to a point, and we didn't manage to break with the patriarchal structures or models.

So we began to act, building the Workers Party in Brazil. (The Party was two years old already, but in our region it was only just beginning.) We didn't stay long in the party as we realised this wasn't what we wanted either. We became disillusioned with the Party structure, after we had been in the country side and had contact with rural workers.

So then we organised the movement with rural workers. That was more or less 16 years ago. This was a time of great conflict in the Sertao Central of the northeast, and also a very sad time because the conflict was accompanied by drought and hardship which brings a lot of misery and a lot of hunger - as in the present day.

What kind of work did you do?
When we first arrived, we began a focused discussion a bout the situation for women, and for women as rural workers. This is because we had many compañeras who were widows of living husbands. It happens a lot in the northeast, that men go south in search of work and never return, and yet the whole community, the church and their families, demand that their wives remain faithful.

We had to use new methods and be creative, to find a way for women to love themselves again, to recover their self-esteem. We had to find new dynamics to get out of this situation, to overcome it instead of learning to live with it. Even those compañeras who were afraid to take part realised that by participating they would be able to take control of their lives, but that they would go through a lot of pain at the same time. They were afraid to participate because they had to break with and confront that model of society imposed by the church and by every body else.

We explored new ways of working. I couldn't even write and I began to write. All this happened as a way to enable the women widows to find a way to speak, because they would not speak at first. I couldn't draw either, but I began to draw. We also used clay, mud to express what we were feeling. Mud and clay are things which are experienced first hand. The houses are made of mud, floors are made of "beaten mud". We washed clothes on a river-bank that was also made of mud. The idea came up that as they did not go out to attend meetings and that everything was work, work, work, we decided to wash clothes with them. We started to play with mud, to express what we were feeling, to make dolls, to destroy the house that is overwhelming me (literally, "crushing my head").

As a result of this work, some compañeras are now autonomous and independent. From this starting point, we passed on to more daring actions, like the land occupations. I had no sons then. There was some land where these compañeras who were "widows of living husbands" lived. They built a shack for me and we began to work on the land together. After a while the land was not enough to go round and we organised the occupation of a larger piece of land. But that was after doing political work and having worked on the land for a time.

You occupy a piece of land after you have managed to establish a relationship with the land, after getting an analysis of the global situation, an understanding of the way things are and a political awareness.

I began to travel from place to place after we researched the first droughts in the region. We began in the settlements in the driest region, where children die of hunger and thirst. We carried out the investigation over a year and then we went to another settlement and did the same. From there the idea was born to go from settlement to settlement.

When they started going on about this story of celebrating 500 years since the discovery of Brazil, we began to protest against 500 years of lies and domination. Two years be fore the anniversary, we collected a type of informal literature "de cordel", which used to be a way for workers to communicate with each other by writing in verse and stretching out the papers in ropes for display at fairs. It was a way to recover the history of people's struggle.

What are the aims of the group?
Let me see if I can explain it. One of the objectives of the group is not to be centralised. We discussed this and decided it by consensus after many years of selfcritique and internal reflection, years of trying to build a different society.

One of the objectives today, in the present time which extends back into the past and for ward into the future, is to develop ways of life, attitudes to ward life, which enable people to establish a new relationship between each other and between themselves and the land. We understand that the Earth is not the heritage of any group or even of the landless who occupy the land, nor of proprietors or big landowners. It is the heritage of humanity.

We understand that the Earth is not the heritage of any group or even of the landless who occupy the land, nor of proprietors or big landowners. It is the heritage of humanity

One of our objectives is to live autonomously on the land. And this is one of the big differences that we have with Movimento Sem Terra ("Landless Movement- MST) tod a y. We have a great divergence with them because of this belief of ours. Because when you occupy land, through the Agrarian Reform, the ministry gives you the right to receive a title as the owner of the land and so you stay in a relationship with the state, which finances yourwork on the land. This is why there is no longer a free relationship between you and the land, as this relationship is mediated by commerce . You are accountable to the state that pays for production .

There was a reporter there who started to commentate, saying that we were all mad and had nothing to lose, that we were armed, that there were many of us, that we were very dangerous and prepared to do anything. Thanks to this we escaped a massacre. We heard shots around us, but they didn't come near.

But it so happened that this land belonged to a very influential landowner. He had links with Members of Parliament, with senators. He had a lot of influence with the commissions who drew up the statutes for the agrarian reform in Brazil. It was the eve of the elections in Brazil. We thought they must be waiting until the elections were over so they could carry out a massacre. The landowner went to the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INCRA) to ask for the land to be reintegrated, saying that the hacienda was not big enough to apply agrarian reform. So INCRA gave the rights to the owner's family because they said he had inheritors and so the land could not be expropriated.

So INCRA came to negotiate with us, as we had lied to them, saying that we were many families. Wenegotiated going to another farm. We had no foodand we did not have enough people to work in order to survive. They gave us a choice between three different farms. We checked out each one of the three.

They treated us with respect because they thought there were lots of us. They took us to see the land, for us to choose which one we liked the best. When we accepted one of them, we were worried because, how were we going to tell them there were only nine families?

When you negotiate with INCRA, you have the right to transpo rtation to take the families to the land. It was interesting because, at the time of negotiating, the president of INCRA asked us how many trucks we needed to transport all the families. We looked at each other and told him that we would have to discuss it with the assembly, because there were many families who were not present at this meeting for fear of the gunmen and repression and violence.

So when we got back there after the meeting we died laughing- we were only nine families! And so we told them, "Look, almost everyone has gone, there are only nine families left, but even so we are going to resist until the end and we want a truck for these nine families".

It was funny because when we passed by the door way of the house of the landowner, which was bristling with gunmen, in a little lorry headed for the city, there were only nine families, and they were mad with rage because they had expected a whole procession of lorries.

We also had problems because not all the group could come. I was chosen but it does not mean that I am representing the whole group, rather that I am the spokesperson of our collective experience.

One concept that is talked about but not put into practice with PGA, is the idea of horizontal relations as a new form of solidarity. Do you have an idea of how horizontal relations can exist between the north and south movements?

The contacts which we have had with groups in Europe has been with groups with very similar interests, so we have not had problems, nor have conflicts arisen. It has been about having discussions together. One thing which we have been afraid of is the money relationship which is established between some northern and southern groups, and this seems to alter the flow of relationships slightly.

The contacts we have with groups in Europe have mostly been in the sense of solidarity, of information, the sharing of experiences, communication, strengthening the communication of experiences. We wrote a repo rt about slave labour of children and women, which has put our lives in danger. There are groups in Europe who have asked how they act in solidarity, whether we need money or legal help if we are tried. We think that it is more interesting for them to come and experience our lives here, with or without money.

There is a magazine in France, whose name I forget, whose form of solidarity was to publish the report. We also suffered repression because of this, some houses were burned down. We had death threats, against children, against everyone. One form of solidarity would be to spread this information.

It was interesting because they took on spreading this repo rt, but some compañeros have come already, to share this experience, to eat beans with us and to live our lives. So it is possible to build a solidarity movement between the North and the South, putting an end to this paternalistic vision, which it seems some compañeros in Europe used to have. We already proved to the PGA that you can construct an international movement of solidarity that goe s beyond money.

Is there a conflict between raising children and being involved in political activity?
My sons were born during conflicts over land. One is 10 and the other is nine. So it was a case of one in the push - chair and the other in my arms. They were brought up collectively. We share children, we don't feel as if we own our children. Women have a supportive relationship with one another. There are times that some have six to eight children and we take turns to look after the children. If someone wants to go on a demonstration or some other activity, the children are looked after.

One time we occupied a piece of public land by the Secretariat of the Ministry of Agriculture, and we spent 17 days in the middle of the main street in Porto Alegre - sleeping and eating. The police arrived with the Minors Court to weaken the protest, saying that they were going to take the children a way to Social Services, because they said these children were in danger, because they were dirty there was a danger they could get diarrhoea.

We formed a barricade of women and children and said that the children weren't going anywhere. We were hungry and without water on our settlement - if necessary we would die there in the middle of a public square so that the whole world would know what was going on. From that point on, many people approached us, offering solidarity. One of the things which happens with children when we go on demonstrations is that when they begin to speak, they themselves already have a different outlook.

Can you describe your vision for the future?
Today we are beginning to write up, collectively, the life experience of the settlement, and through this we have begun to perceive the sexist, capitalist relations which play themselves out day by day in the settlement. The scorching, the beatings, men working whole nights to get the money together to pay the money owed to the government for credit. The group wrote about the life of the settlement and what they proposed as a group to improve their lives. Although the settlement is very divided politically, this group wants to change the relationship with the state, which it is linked to through INCRA, to be able to live out this experience more humanely.

One of the things which strengthens us, although I am repeating myself here, is to challenge the social relations, values, everything imposed by the free market system. And that's what we want to do, starting from food, for example, not to eat genetically modified foods, or industrial foods. To negate a consumer society, clothes and music and going on in the same vein, to comics and children's games.

We are living a dream based in reality, a dream of many generations, inspired by all the compañeros who have participated in the vision of a better world. I don't want to talk about it because it is a collective construction. It is the construction of many compañeros who thought, who died and others who continue to build relationships built upon solidarity, equality and love.