Brazil’s Bolsonaro hopes land titles will lure rural votes

By MAURICIO SAVARESE
Associated Press

SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is backing a program that aims to give ownership rights to some 340,000 people who now live on lands that are either state owned or were privately held but unused. The far-right leader is trailing in the polls and hoping the Title Brazil program will help boost his odds of reelection. He’s touted the program as a means of settling old disputes, creating legal certainty and weakening the leftist Landless Workers Movement, which backs his rival for the presidency. It’s a partial, free-market approach to land reform in a vast nation that since colonial times has seen great inequalities in the distribution of land.