International Women's Day Not Forgotten In Brazil
Posted 19th March 2001

BRASILIA, Brazil: Women farmers throughoutBrazil demonstrated last Thursday on International Women's Day to protest worldwide economic policies they say are unfair. Some 700 women members of Brazil's Landless Rural Workers Movement occupied a McDonald's restaurant in Porto Alegre, some 1,600 kms (1,000 miles) south of Brasilia. They burned flags bearing the fast-food chain's logo, criticized economic globalization and called the Brazilian government a slave to ''world neoliberalism.''

Thursday's protest was inspired by the anti-globalization efforts of French activist Jose Bove a sheep farmer who shot to fame for ransacking a McDonald's restaurant in France and was arrested in Brazil last January after he joined the workers movement in a massive protest. Also on Thursday, some 2,000 women blocked access to a supermarket in Florianopolis, 1,300 kms (800 miles) south of Brasilia, claiming it sold genetically engineered food. And in Belo Horizonte, some 600 kms (380 miles) southeast of Brasilia, a group of women protested in front of the local city council chambers demanding that the government speed up agrarian reform.