Brazil: demands of the protesters

Today July 11 is a day of national mobilization across Brazil.

The Platform of Working Class Organizations has issued the following demands:

1. Weekly working hours limited to 40 by law.
2. Abandonment of the constitutional reform project that would demolish worker rights.
3. A progressive tax reform, so the wealthy pay more. 
4. Priority of public investment in quality health, education and transport services, instead of debt payment and primary surplus.
5. Suspension of oil and mining exploitation auctions, which only benefit multinational corporations.
6. Zero tariff in public transport for all the population. 

The popular mobilization in Brazil, far from receding is growing, affecting to all kinds of popular sectors. Notably worker mobilization is increasing dramatically across the country. 

The several farm worker organizations have also presented their own list of demands:

1. Recovery of national sovereignty over the land. The government should declare null the sold farmlands and/or expropriate the ones already ceded to foreign capitalists.
2. Speed up the agrarian reform, settling in thousands of farmer families now living at the roadsides.
3. Public policies of support, stimulation and credit for cheap, healthy and ecological food produce. Structural programs for rural youth and women.
4. Grant the rights of rural peoples by acknowledging and delimiting the indigenous lands, as well as the rights of people affected by reservoirs, fishing demarcations, etc.
5. Ban immediately the pesticides and other agrotoxics already banned elsewhere on Earth, ban of air fumigation. Deep revision of the policies towards GMOs and social control.
6. Government policy of control of deforestation, support for the recovery of degraded areas and reforestation by the locals. 
7. Suppression of privatization of natural resources such as water, energy, forests, rivers, minerals and the sea. Immediate abandonment of the the Mining Bill project and an ample and democratic debate for a new such law.
8. Immediate implementation of programs to eradicate illiteracy and grant access to school to all rural communities.
9. Suspension of auctions of irrigated zones in the NE and their destination to agrarian reform instead, as well as democratization of access and management of water resources.
10. End of the Kandir Law, which leaves untaxed the big agricultural and mineral exporters.

Source: LINyM[es].