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Brazil landless march on capital | ||
The protesters arrived in Brasilia after a two-week 200km (125-mile) walk from the city of Goiania, capital of the neighbouring state. They say they want to highlight the government's failure to distribute land and resettle landless peasant families. Later on Monday, they are set to gather at a Brasilia football stadium. On Tuesday, they will assemble around the city's administrative centre. The march is the biggest staged by the Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST), which is organising the protest, the Agencia Brasil says. Nearly all the city's security forces have been deployed to police it, Efe news agency quotes Brasilia's security chief Gen Athos Costa as saying. Wealth gap "The march was long and difficult," Nina, a young woman on the march, told the BBC News website. "But people showed solidarity and unity. It wasn't a party atmosphere, but a feeling of working as a team.
"And it was also about the personal development of each person on the march. Every day, after marching, we held study groups and lectures." MST says the government has failed to live up to its election promises to have settled 400,000 families by 2006. Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was elected in 2003, promised to buy disused land and redistribute it to poor families with no home of their own. The government says it has already settled a little over a quarter of its target, but MST says the real figure is much lower. "We are holding the march because the government is failing to honour [its] promise," Nina said. Brazil has one of the biggest wealth gaps in the world. Nearly half of all farmland is owned by just 1% of the population. | ||
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