Why Land Is Key to Brazil's Presidency

Lagging Lula in polls, Bolsonaro is wooing rural voters by giving squatters title to their farms

- Simone Preissler Iglesias, with Tatiana Freitas and Isadora Sanches

In 1999, Franciele Raffo’s parents took over a small plot of land 800 miles south of São Paulo, just shy of Brazil’s border with Argentina. They soon began raising dairy cattle on the rich, red earth, built a brick house, and later expanded the stables to make room for pigs, chickens, and ducks. There was just one hitch: They’d bought the 47-acre farm from a squatter, and they had no proof they owned it.

Then in November, Raffo and her mother, now a 74-year-old widow, headed into the nearby village of Capão do Cipó. There, in a vast barnlike space, local representatives of the conservative party of President Jair Bolsonaro handed the Raffos and about 80 neighbors certificates granting title to their land. “Nobody imagined Bolsonaro would support us rather than large farmers,” says Raffo, 35. “It gave us freedom to live our lives, improve our property, and even get a bank loan.”

The ceremony was one of hundreds that have taken place across Brazil, particularly in the agricultural south, over the past three years as Bolsonaro has sought to shore up support among rural voters. In a country scarred by land conflicts, the title ceremonies have helped the president defang the once- fearsome Landless Workers’ Movement, or MST, a Marxist-inspired group that’s sponsored thousands of invasions of large farms and handed the land over to the poor. In Bolsonaro’s first three years in office, more deeds were distributed than in 13 years of leftist governments led by Dilma Rousseff and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.