Landless Workers' Movement

Landless Workers' Movement

Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra
Formation	January 1984
Legal status	Social movement
Purpose	Agrarian land reform
Services	Land reform movement, squatting (primary); basic healthcare and education (secondary)
Membership	1,500,000
Main organ	Núcleo de Base
Parent organization	National Coordination Body

MST supporters in Brazil.

Landless Workers' Movement (Portuguese: Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, MST) is a social movement in Brazil, inspired by Marxism, generally regarded as one of the largest in Latin America with an estimated informal membership of 1.5 million across 23 of Brazil's 26 states. MST defines its goals as access to the land for poor workers through land reform in Brazil and activism around social issues that make land ownership more difficult to achieve, such as unequal income distribution, racism, sexism, and media monopolies. MST strives to achieve a self-sustainable way of life for the rural poor.

The MST differs from previous land reform movements in its single-issue focus; land reform for them is a self-justifying cause. The organization maintains that it is legally justified in occupying unproductive land, pointing to the most recent Constitution of Brazil (1988), which contains a passage saying that land should fulfill a social function (Article 5, XXIII). The MST also notes, based on 1996 census statistics, that 3% of the population owns two-thirds of all arable land in Brazil.

Land reform before the 1988 constitution

Land reform has a long history in Brazil, and the concept pre-dates the MST. In the mid-20th century, Brazilian leftists reached a consensus that democratization and widespread actual exercise of political rights would require land reform. Brazilian political elites actively opposed land reform initiatives, which they felt threatened their social and political status. As such, political leaders of the rural poor attempted to achieve land reform from below, through grassroots action. MST broke new ground by tackling land reform itself, "breaking... dependent relations with parties, governments, and other institutions", and framing the issue in purely political terms rather than social, ethical or religious ones.

The first statute to regulate land ownership in Brazil after its independence, Law 601 or Lei de Terras (Landed Property Act), took effect September 18, 1850. A colonial administration, based on Portuguese feudal law, had previously considered property ownership to stem from royal grants (sesmarias) and pass through primogeniture (morgadio). In the independent Brazilian state, the default means of acquiring land was through purchase, from either the state or a previous private owner. This law strongly limited squatter's rights and favoured the historic concentration of land ownership which became a hallmark of modern Brazilian social history. The Lei de Terras left in place the colonial practice of favouring of large landholdings created by mammoth land grants to well-placed people, which were usually worked by slaves.

In capitalist terms, continuing the policy favoured economies of scale given the limited number of land owners, but at the same time made it difficult for small planters and peasants to obtain the land needed to practice subsistence agriculture and small-scale farming.

The consolidation of land ownership into just a few hands had ties to the advent of capitalism in Brazil, and opposition and insurrection in the 19th and early 20th century (for example the Canudos War in the 1890s and the Contestado War in the 1910s) idealized older forms of property and revitalized ideologies centered on a fabled millenarian return to an earlier, pre-bourgeois social order. Advocated by groups led by rogue messianic religious leaders outside the established Catholic hierarchy, these ideologies seemed heretical and revolutionary. Some leftist historians, following the tracks of the groundbreaking 1963 work by journalist Rui Facó (Cangaceiros e Fanáticos), tend to conflate early 20th-century banditry in northeastern Brazil (cangaço) with messianism as a kind of social banditry, a protest against such social inequalities as the uneven distribution of land assets. This theory developed independently in English-speaking academia around Eric Hobsbawn's 1959 work Primitive Rebels. It was criticized for its unspecific definition of "social movement", but also praised for melding political and religious movements, previously separately examined. This blend was later the basis for the MST's emergence.

Both messianism and cangaço disappeared in the late 1930s, but in the 1940s and '50s, additional peasant resistance broke out to evictions and land grabbing by powerful ranchers:

• Teófilo Otoni, Minas Gerais, in 1948
• Porecatu, Paraná, in 1951
• Southwest Paraná, in 1957
• Trombas and Goiás, 1952–1958

These local affairs, however, were repressed or settled locally and did not give rise to an ideology. Policy makers and scholars across the political spectrum believed that it was, objectively, an economic necessity to permit the end of Brazilian rural society through mechanized agrobusiness and forcible urbanization. The left in particular felt that the technologically backward, feudal latifundia impeded both economic modernization and democratization.

During the 1960s various groups attempted land reform through the legal system, beginning with the peasant leagues (Ligas Camponesas) in northeastern Brazil, which opposed eviction of tenant farmers land and the transformation of plantations into cattle ranches. These groups questioned the existing distribution of land ownership through a rational appeal to the social function of property.

Despite the efforts of these groups, land ownership continued to concentrate, and both at the time of MST's founding and in the present day Brazil has had a highly dynamic and robust agricultural business sector that came, say some, at the price of extensive dislocation of the rural poor. MST questioned the scope of the benefits from the alleged efficiency of the change, given that since 1850 Brazilian land development had been concerned with the interests of a single class – the rural bourgeoisie. While the MST frames its policies in socio-economic terms, it still points to Canudos and its alleged millenarism to legitimize its existence and to develop a powerful mystique of its own.

A great deal of the early organizing in the MST came from Catholic communities. Much of MST ideology and practice come from a social doctrine of the Catholic Church: that private property should serve a social function. This principle developed during the 19th century and became Catholic doctrine with Pope Leo XIII's Rerum novarum encyclical, promulgated on the eve of the 1964 military coup. This doctrine was evoked by President João Goulart at a rally in Rio de Janeiro, at which he offered a blueprint for political and social reforms and proposed expropriation of estates larger than 600 hectares in areas near federal facilities such as roads, railroads, reservoirs and sanitation works; these ideas triggered a strong conservative backlash and led to Goulart's loss of power. Nevertheless the Brazilian Catholic hierarchy formally acknowledged the principle in 1980.

In Brazilian constitutional history, land reform – understood in terms of public management of natural resources – was first explicitly mentioned as a guiding principle of government in the 1967 constitution, which sought to institutionalize an authoritarian consensus after the 1964 coup. The military dictatorship intended to use land reform policy to develop a buffer of conservative small farmers between latifundia owners and the rural proletariat. In 1969, at the most repressive point of the dictatorship, the 1967 constitution was amended by a decree (ato institucional) by a junta that held interim power during the final illness of president Arthur da Costa e Silva, authorizing government compensation for property expropriated for land reform. This compensation would be made in government bonds rather than cash, previously the only legal practice (Art. 157, §1, as amended by Institutional Act No. 9, 1969).

Land reform and the 1988 constitution

The constitution now in effect, passed in 1988, requires that "property shall serve its social function" and that the government should "expropriate for the purpose of agrarian reform, rural property that is not performing its social function."

Under Article 186 of the constitution, a social function is performed when rural property simultaneously meets the following requirements:

• Rational and adequate use.
• Adequate use of available natural resources and preservation of the environment.
• Compliance with the provisions which regulate labor relations.
• Development uses which favor the well-being of owners and workers.

Since the criteria are vague and not objectively defined, the social interest principle was seen as a mixed blessing, but accepted in general. Landowners have lobbied against the principle since 1985 through the landowners' organization, União Democrática Ruralista (Democratic Union of Rural People, or UDR), whose rise and organization parallels that of the MST. Although it avowedly dissolved itself in the early 1990s, some believe it persists in informal regional ties between landowners. UDR lobbying over the constitutional text is believed to have watered down concrete enforcement of the "social interest" principle.

One Brazilian law handbook argues that land reform, as understood in the 1988 constitution, is a concept made up of various "compromises" on which constitutional law has consistently evaded taking a clear stance, and so one could argue either for or against the MST without leaving the framework of the Constitution. The lack of clear government commitment to land reform precludes the MST engaging in public-interest litigation, so concrete proceedings for land reform are left to the initiative of the groups concerned, through onerous and time-consuming legal proceedings. Given "the highly problematic and ideologically driven nature of the Brazilian justice system". all parties have an incentive to resort to more informal methods: "while the large landowners try to evacuate squatters from their land, squatters might use violence to force institutional intervention favoring them with the land expropriation afterwards [...] violence is mandatory for both sides to achieve their goals". These tactics raise controversy about the legality of the MST's actions, since it tries to ensure social justice unilaterally.

The MST identifies rural land it believes to be unproductive and that does not meet its social function, then occupies the land, only afterwards moving to ascertain the legality of the occupation. The MST is represented in these activities by public interest legal counsel, including their own lawyers, sons and daughters of MST families, as well as organizations such as Terra de Direitos, a human rights organization co-founded by Darci Frigo, the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Human Rights Award Laureate. The courts might eventually issue a warrant for eviction, requiring the occupier families to leave, or it might deny the landowner's petition and allow the families to stay provisionally and engage in subsistence farming until the federal agency responsible for agrarian reform, Brazil's National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), determines whether occupied property had indeed been unproductive. The MST's legal activity bases itself on the idea that property rights are in a continuous process of social construction, so litigation and seeking to strike sympathy among the judiciary is essential to MST's legitimacy.

Traditionally, Brazilian courts side with landowners and file charges against MST members some call "frivolous and bizarre". For instance, in a 2004 land occupation in Pernambuco, a judge issued arrest warrants for MST members and described them as highly dangerous criminals. Nevertheless, many individual judges have shown themselves sympathetic. Brazilian higher courts have usually regarded the MST with reserve: in February 2009, for instance, the then-president of the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF), Gilmar Mendes, declared the MST engaged in "illicit" activities and opposed granting it public monies, and supported an "adequate" judicial response towards land occupation. The MST leadership has in turn on various occasions charged that the STF as a whole is consistently hostile to the movement. In late 2013, it described the court as "lackeying to the ruling class" and "working for years against the working class and social movements". This fraught relationship came to a head on February 12, 2014, when a court session was suspended after an attempted invasion of the court building in Brasilia by MST activists, who were met by police firing rubber bullets and tear gas.

History

Foundation

Monument by Oscar Niemeyer dedicated to the MST.

The smashing of the peasant leagues following the 1964 coup opened the way for commercialized agriculture and concentration of land ownership throughout the period of the military dictatorship, and an absolute decline in the rural population during the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, out of 370 million hectares of farm land total, 285 million hectares (77%) were held by latifundia. The re-democratization process in the 1980s, however, allowed grassroots movements to pursue their own interests rather than those of the state and the ruling classes. The emergence of the MST fits into this framework.

Between late 1980 and early 1981, over 6,000 landless families established an encampment on land located between three unproductive estates in Brazil's southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul. These families included 600 households expropriated and dislocated in 1974 from nearby Passo Real to make way for construction of a hydroelectric dam. This first group was later joined by an additional 300 (or, according to other sources, over 1,000) households evicted by FUNAI from the Kaingang Indian reservation in Nonoai, where they had been renting plots since 1968. Local mobilization of the Passo Real and Nonoai people had already achieved some land distribution on non-Indian land, followed by demobilization. Those who had not received land under these claims, joined by others, and led by leaders from the existing regional movement, MASTER (Rio Grande do Sul landless farmers' movement), made up the 1980/1981 encampment. The location became known as the Encruzilhada Natalino. With the support of civil society, including the progressive branch of the Catholic Church, the families resisted a blockade imposed by military force. Enforcement of the blockade was entrusted by the government to Army colonel Sebastião Curió, already notorious for his past counter-insurgency efforts against the Araguaia guerrillas.

Curió enforced the blockade ruthlessly, most of the landless refused his offer of resettlement on the Amazonian frontier, and eventually pressured the military government into expropriating nearby lands for agrarian reform. The Encruzilhada Natalino episode set a pattern. Most of subsequent early development of the MST concerned exactly the areas of southern Brazil where, in the absence of an open frontier, an ideological appeal at an alternate foundation for access to the land - other than formal private property - was developed in response to the growing difficulties agribusiness posed for family farming. The MST also developed what became its chief modus operandi: local organizing around the concrete struggles of a specific demographic group.

The MST was officially founded in January 1984, during a National Encounter of landless workers in Cascavel, Paraná, as Brazil's military dictatorship drew to a close. Its founding was strongly connected to Catholic-based organizations such as the Pastoral Land Commission, which provided support and infrastructure.

During much of the 1980s, the MST faced political competition from the National Confederacy of Agrarian Workers' (CONTAG), heir to the peasant leagues of the 1960s, who sought land reform strictly through legal means, by favoring trade unionism and striving to wrestle concessions from bosses for rural workers. But the more aggressive tactics of the MST in striving for access to land gave a political legitimacy that soon outshone CONTAG, which limited itself to tradeunionism in the strictest sense, acting until today as a rural branch of the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT). MST eventually all but monopolized political attention as a spokesman for rural workers.

From the 1980s on, the MST hasn't had a monopoly of land occupations, many of which are carried out by a host of grassroots organizations (dissidents from the MST, trade unions, informal coalitions of land workers).However, the MST is by far the most organized group dealing in occupations, and has political leverage enough to turn occupation into formal expropriation for public purposes. In 1995, only 89 of 198 occupations (45%) were organized by the MST, but these included 20,500 (65%) out of the grand total of 31,400 families involved.

Violent confrontations: the Cardoso years (1995 - 2005)

In the long history of violent land conflicts in Brazil, the emergence of the MST and its consolidation into the most prominent land reform movement in Brazil during the 1990s led to what has been called a first "wave" of MST-led occupations (1995–1999), and with it the movement's involvement in various bloody clashes and ensuing conflicting claims, where government authorities, landowners and the MST charge one other with responsibility for the deaths, maimings and property damages caused by the violence.

In a notorious 1996 incident usually called the Eldorado de Carajás massacre, 19 MST members were gunned down and another 69 wounded by police as they blocked a state road in Pará. In 1997 alone, similar confrontations with police and landowners' security details accounted for two dozen internationally acknowledged deaths.

In 2002, the MST occupied the family business farm of then-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Minas Gerais, a move publicly condemned by Lula, then leader of the leftist opposition. and other prominent members of the PT. The farm was damaged and looted in the occupation, including the destruction of a combine harvester, a tractor and several pieces of furniture. MST members also drank the entire stock of alcoholic beverages at the farm. In all, 16 MST leaders were later charged with theft, vandalism, trespassing, resisting arrest and for holding others in captivity.

In 2005, two police officers working undercover on an investigation of cargo truck robberies near an MST homestead in Pernambuco were attacked by criminals. One was shot dead and the other tortured, amid suspicions of MST involvement.

Throughout the early 2000s the MST began to occupy functioning facilities owned by large corporations whose activities it considered at odds with the social function of property. On March 8, 2005, the MST invaded a nursery and a research center in Barra do Ribeiro, 56 km from Porto Alegre, both owned by Aracruz Celulose. The MST members held local guards captive while they ripped plants from the ground. MST president João Pedro Stédile commented that MST should oppose not only landowners but also agrobusiness, "the project of organization of agriculture by transnational capital allied to capitalist farming"—a model he deems socially backwards and environmentally harmful. In the words of an anonymous activist: "our struggle is not only to win the land ... we are building a new way of life". The shift had been developing since the movement's 2000 national congress, which concerned itself chiefly with the perceived threat of transnational corporations whether Brazilian or foreign to both small property in general and to Brazilian national food sovereignty, especially in the area of intellectual property. This principle that led to the July 2000 attack on a ship in Recife loaded with GM maize from Argentina. And indeed, from 2000 on, much of the movement's activism consisted in symbolic acts directed against multinational corporations as "a symbol of the intervention politics of the big monopolies operating in Brazil".

The change in strategy could also have corresponded to a perceived shift in government stance since in the late 1990s and early 2000s spokespersons for the Cardoso government declared that Brazil "had no need" for land reform, that small farms were not competitive, and were unlikely to increasee personal incomes in rural areas. Therefore they were a foolhardy alternative to policies emphasizing creation of skilled wage-labor positions, since expanding general employment levels would eventually cause the land reform issue to "recede" into the background. The MST's actions were denounced by Cardoso as aiming for a return to an archaic agrarian past, and therefore in conflict with "modernity": "one of the enabling myths of the neoliberal discourse".

Cardoso offered lip service to agrarian reform in general, but also described the movement as "a threat to democracy". He compared the MST's demands for subsidized credit, which led to the 1998 occupation of various banks in Paraná, to someone "who enters a bank as a robber". In a memoir written after he left office, Cardoso expressed sympathy for land reform, stating that "were I not President, I would probably be out marching with them", but also saying that "the image of mobs [sic] taking over privately-owned farms would chase away investment, both local and foreign". Cardoso himself however never branded the MST as terrorist, a step taken by his Minister of Agricultural Development, who even hypothesized about an invasion of Argentine from the north by the movement as a way to blackmail the Brazilian government into action. In July 1997, Cardoso' Chief of Military Household (Chefe da Casa Militar, i.a. a general comptroller over all issues regarding the military and police forces as armed civil servants) expressed concern about participation of MST activists in the then-ongoing police officers' strikes, as part of a supposed plot to "destabilize" the military.

As far as concrete measures were concerned, Cardoso's stance towards land reform was divided: at the same time it took steps to accelerate public acquisitions of land for settlement and increased taxes on unused land, it also forbade public inspection of invaded land - thereby precluding future expropriation - and the disbursement of public funds to people involved in such invasions. Cardoso's chief land reform project, supported by a World Bank US$90 million loan, was addressed to individuals who had previous experience in farming and a maximum yearly income of US$15,000, and who were granted a loan of up to US$40,000 if they could associate with other rural producers in order to buy land from a willingly landholder - a land reform programme that catered primarily for substantial small farmers, as opposed to the MST's traditional constituency, the rural poor. Cardoso's project, Cédula da Terra ("landcard") actually offered also previously landless people the opportunity to buy land - but then, only after a negotiated process in which land would be bought directly from landowners.

In the words of an American scholar, notwithstanding its efforts in actual resettlement, the issue evaded by the Cardoso government was precisely that of contesting the hitherto ruling mode of agricultural development: concentrated, mechanized, latifundia-friendly commodity production - as well as the larger injustices produced by it. In his own words, what Cardoso could not stomach about the MST was what he saw not as a struggle for land reform, but against the capitalist system as such. Therefore the fact that Cardoso's administration tried to set on its feet various "alternative", tamer social movements which were supposed to pressure for land reform on purely negotiated terms, such as the Movement of Landless Producers (Movimento dos Agricultores Sem Terra, or MAST), organized on a local basis in the São Paulo State, around the trade union central Syndical Social Democracy, or SDS.

Opposedly, MST leaders emphasized at the time and since that their practical activity was a response to the existence of a host of destitutes whose prospects of obtaining productive, continuous employment in conventional labor markets was bleak, as admitted even by President Cardoso, who during a 1996 interview, said: "I'm not to say that my government will be of the excluded, for that it cannot be ... I don't know how many excluded there will be". Around the same time (2002) João Pedro Stedile admitted that in plotting the movement's politics, one had to keep in mind "that there are a great many lumpens in the country areas". - something that in his view should not be held against the working class character of the movement, as a great number of Brazilian rural working class had been "absorbed" into the outer periphery of the urban proletariat. Such a view is shared by some academic authors, who argue for the fact that, behind its avowedly "peasant" character, the MST, as far as class politics is concerned, is mostly a semi proletarian movement, congregating people trying to eke out a living, in the absence of formal wage employment, out of a range of activities across a whole section of the social division of labour.

In a certain way, the MST's activities somewhat filled the void left by the decline of the organized labor movement in the wake of Cardoso's neoliberal policies. Therefore the fact that the movement has taken steps in order to strike alliances with urban based struggles, specially those connected to housing issues. In João Pedro Stedile's words at the time, the concrete struggle for land reform would "unfold" in the countryside, but only to be eventually decided in the city, where "political power for structural change" resides.

The Lula government and the March for Agrarian Reform (2005 - 2010)

The Lula government was seen by the MST as a leftist and therefore friendly government, so they decided to shun occupations of public buildings in favor of actions directed solely towards private landed states, in a second wave of occupations from 2003 onwards. However, the increasingly conservative positions of the Lula government, including its low profile on land reform, actually somewhat less than achieved by Cardoso in his first term) impelled the movement to change its stance as early as early 2004, when it again began to occupy public buildings and Banco do Brasil agencies.

In June 2003, the MST occupied the R&D farm of Monsanto Company in the state of Goiás. On March 7, 2008, a similar action by women activists at another Monsanto facility at Santa Cruz das Palmeiras, São Paulo, destroyed a nursery and an experimental patch of genetically modified maize, slowing ongoing scientific research. MST said they destroyed the research facility to protest government support for the extensive use of GMOs supplied by transnational corporations in agriculture. In 2003 Lula authorized the sale and use of GM soybeans, which led MST's Stedile to call him a "transgenic politician". The dominance of transnationals over Brazilian seed production was summed by the fact that the Brazilian hybrid seed industry in the early 2000s already was 82% Monsanto-owned, which the MST saw as detrimental to the development of organic agriculture in spite of the economic benefits, and enabling possible future health hazards similar to those posed by the intensive use of pesticides, Stedile later called Monsantp one of the ten transnational companies that controlled virtually all international agrarian production and commodity trading. A similar episode happened in 2006; the MST occupied a research station in Paraná owned by Swiss corporation Syngenta, which had produced GMO contamination near the Iguaçu National Park. After a bitter confrontation over the existence of the station (which included easing of previous restrictions by the Lula government to allow Syngenta to continue GMO research), the premises were transferred to the Paraná state government and converted into an agroecology research center.

After an exchange of barbs between Lula and Stedile over what Lula saw as an unnecessary radicalization of the movement's demands, the MST decided to call a huge national demonstration: in May 2005, after a two-week, 200-odd kilometer march from the city of Goiânia, nearly 13,000 landless workers arrived in their nation's capital, Brasilia. The MST march targeted the U.S. embassy and Brazilian Finance Ministry, rather than President Lula. While thousands of landless carried banners and scythes through the streets, a delegation of 50 held a three-hour meeting with Lula, who donned an MST cap for the cameras. During this session Lula recommitted to settling 430,000 families by the end of 2006 and agreed to allocate the necessary human and financial resources to accomplish this goal. He also committed to a range of related reforms, including an increase in the pool of lands available for redistribution [Ramos, 2005]. Later the Lula government would claim to have resettled 381,419 families between 2002 and 2006 - a claim disputed by the MST. The movement claimed the numbers had been doctored by the inclusion of people already living in areas (national forests and other managed areas of environmental protection, as well as other already existing settlements) where their presence had only been legally acknowledged by the government. The MST also criticised Lula's administration to call mere land redistribution by means of handing out of small plots land reform, when it was simply a form of welfarism (assistencialismo) unable to change the productive system.

The march was held to demand – among other things – that Brazil's President Lula implement his own limited agrarian reform plan rather than spend the project's budget on servicing the national debt [Ramos, 2005]. Several leaders of the MST met with President Lula da Silva on May 18, 2005- a meeting that had been resisted by Lula since his taking of office. The leaders presented President Lula with a list of 16 demands of which included economic reform, greater public spending, and public housing. Afterwards during interviews with Reuters, many of the leaders said that they still regarded President Lula as an ally but demanded that he accelerate his promised land reforms. However, late the same year, in September, João Pedro Stedile declared that, as far as land reform was concerned, Lula's government was "finished". By the end of Lula's first term, it was clear that the MST had decided to act again as a separate movement, irrespective of the government's agenda. As far as the MST was concerned, the greatest gain it received from the Lula government was the non-criminalization of the movement itself- the tough anti-occupation measures taken by the Cardoso government were left in abeyance and not enforced. Attempts at lawmaking that could be tailored in order to define the MST as a "terrorist organization" were also successfully opposed by Workers' Party congresspersons. Nevertheless, the Lula government never acted in tandem with the MST, according to a general pattern of keeping organized social movements outside the fostering of the government's agenda.

Into a nutshell, however, as stated by a German author, in terms of land reform, what the Lula government did in general was to forward, year after year, a blueprint that was also regularly blockaded by regional agrarian elites.

Lula's election to the presidency raised the possibility of active government support for land reform, so conservative media increased their efforts to brand the MST's actions as felonies. In May 2005, Veja accused the MST of helping the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), the most powerful prison-gang criminal organization in the São Paulo. A police phone tap recording of a conversation between PCC leaders mentioned the MST; one of them said he had "just talked with the leaders of the MST", who would "give instructions" to the gang about the best ways to stage what became the largest protest by prisoners' relatives in Brazilian history. On April 18, 2005 some 3,000 relatives protested prevailing conditions in São Paulo correctional facilities. The MST "leaders" were not named. No MST activist, real or alleged, took part in the taped conversations. The MST denied any link in a formal written statement calling the supposed evidence only hearsay, and an attempt to criminalize the movement. In the wake of 9-11, Brazilian media tended to describe the MST as "terrorist", lumping it together loosely with various historical and mediatic happenings in keeping with an international post-9-11 trend to relegate any political movement against existing globalization to beyond the pale and outside the boundaries of permissible political discourse.

The MST assumes its activities are continuously surveilled by military intelligence. Various intelligence organs, Brazilian and foreign, assume a relationship between the MST and various terrorist groups. The MST is regarded as a source of "civil unrest".

A parliamentary inquiry commission where landowner-friendly congressmen held a majority classified the MST's activities as terrorism in late 2005, and the MST itself as a criminal organization. Its report met with no support from the PT members of the commission however, and a senator ripped it up before TV cameras, saying that those who voted for it were "accomplices of murder, people who use slave labor, who embezzle land illegally". Nevertheless, based on this report, a bill presented to the Chamber of Deputies in 2006 by Congressman Abelardo Lupion (Democrats- Paraná), proposed making "invading others' property with the end of pressuring the government" a terrorist action and therefore a heinous crime. A "heinous" crime in Brazilian law is a felony, designated as such in a 1990 Brazilian law, and those accused of committing them are ineligible for pretrial release.

In April 2006, the MST took over the farm of Suzano Papel e Celulose, a large maker of paper products, in the state of Bahia, because it had more than six square kilometres devoted to eucalyptus growth. Eucalyptus, a non-native plant, has been blamed for environmental degradation in northeastern Brazil, as well as reducing and reducing the availability of land for small agricultural production, called by some "cornering" producers (encurralados pelo eucalipto). In 2011, Veja described such activities as plain theft of eucalyptus wood, quoting an estimate from the state's military police that 3,000 people earned a living in Southern Bahia from theft of wood.

In 2008 a group of public attorneys from Rio Grande do Sul working with the state's military police issued a report charging the MST with collusion with international terrorist groups. The report is used in state courts, according to Amnesty International, to justify eviction orders carried out by the police with what "excessive use of force". The group of attorneys made public a previously classified report bu the Council of Public Attorneys of Rio Grande do Sul asking the state to ban the MST by declaring it an illegal organization.

The report declared further investigation pointless, "as it was public knowledge that the movement and its leadership were guilty of engaging in organized criminality".The report also proposed that where MST activists could "cause electoral disequilibrium", the activists' right to vote be withdrawn by striking them from the voter registry. Declarations issued at the same time by the State Association of Military Policy Commissioned Officers, in an open Red Scare vein, declared the MST "an organized movement striving at instituting a totalitarian state in our country".

Between September 27 and October 7, 2009, the MST occupied an orange plantation in Borebi, State of São Paulo, owned by orange juice multinational Cutrale, the said corporation claiming to have suffered losses worth R$1.2 million (roughly US$603,000) in damaged equipment, missing pesticide, destroyed crops and trees cut by MST activists. The MST replied by declaring the farm to be government property, illegally embezzled by Cutrale, and that the occupation was intended as a protest against this state of affairs, the concomitant destruction being the work of provocateurs.- such questioning of the formal legality of existing private property by denouncing landowers as holding land in adverse possession being one of the movement's main political tools. The Cutrale plantation, Fazenda S. Henrique, was occupied by the MST four more times until 2013, and the multinational's property rights over it are being contested in court by the Federal Government, who alleges that the farm lands were set aside as part of a 1910 settlement projects for foreign immigrants, rights over it going afterward astray during the following century.

During the same period, the MST also repeatedly created roadblocks, blocking highways and railroads, which was part of a strategy of creating media events in order to call the general public's attention to landless workers' plight.

2010 - Present

The MST wholeheartedly declared support for Dilma Rousseff's candidacy, but once elected she offered the movement very qualified support. In a national broadcast in November 2010, she declared land reform a question "of human rights", i.e., a purely humanitarian one. As Lula's chief of staff she supported economic growth even at variance with ecological and land reform concerns. In a radio interview during the campaign she repeated the old conservative hope that economic growth could make Brazilian land issues recede: "What we are doing is doing away with the real basis for the instabilities of the landless. They are losing reasons to fight". Thus one author described the MST's endorsement of Rousseff as a choice of the "lesser evil".

Violent opposition to the movement's activities from state agencies and private individuals continues unabated. On 16 February 2012, eighty families were evicted from an occupation in Alagoas, of a farm rented to a sugar mill awash in unpaid debts. According to MST activist Janaina Stronzake, MST assumes that landowners have a hit list of MST leaders. Many have in fact been killed, although some murders were doctored to make them look like accidents. In April 2014 a Global Witness report called Brazil "the most dangerous place to defend rights to land and the environment", with at least 448 people killed between 2002 and 2013 in disputes over environmental rights and access to land. A report for the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission, Land Conflicts in Brazil 2013, estimated that land struggles were involved in 34 murders in Brazil in 2013, and 36 in 2012.[44]

On April 16, 2012, a group of MST activists occupied the headquarters in Brasília of the Ministry of Agrarian Development, as part of the movement's regular "Red April" campaign, a yearly nationwide occupation initiative in honor of the April 1996 Eldorado dos Carajás massacre. Minister Pepe Vargas declared ongoing talks between the government and the MST suspended for the duration of the occupation.

Land activists were dissatisfied the slowing pace of official land reform projects under the Rousseff government. Fewer families were officially settled in 2011 than in the previous 16 years. Government reaction to the occupation sparked widespread accusations from the PT base that Rousseff had sold out. In a 2012 interview, Stedile admitted that the movement had not benefited from the policies of the PT administrations, since the coalition governments of the PT could not act politically on behalf of land reform.

Both political pundits and activists thought Rousseff's first term was a lean period for land reform, and mainstream media called the MST not only "tamed" by the two consecutive PT administrations, and drained of mass support by steady economic growth and expanding employment, denying the movement its chief raison d'être. In 2013 it attempted only 110 occupations,. and this year saw another all-time low yearly number, only 159 families resettled in land reform plans. MST National Coordinator João Paulo Rodrigues said that the federal government's reliance on agribusiness exports for procuring hard currency was the chief reason the Rousseff administration not only wasn't moving land reform forward, "but , on the contrary, having gone backward in some instances". The only recent advances in land reform policies had come in such programs as the National Program for School Meals (PNAE) and Food Catering Plan (PAA), which buy foodstuffs from land reform farmers for consumption at public schools and other government facilities. Such programs are however "entirely disproportionate to what is being offered [in terms of public monies, subsidized credits, etc. to agribusiness", he said, and the only chance for land reform in Brazil would be a kind of joint venture between small producers and urban working class consumers, as simple land redistribution would be fated to fail, as it had in Venezuela, "where Hugo Chávez stockedpiled seven million hectares of nationalized land property which remained unused for want of proper peasants".

The PT government's base generally felt that the vested interest of agribusiness in setting development policies during the Lula and Rousseff administrations was enough to hamper any attempt at a more aggressive policy of expropriation and land reform.

During November 2014, amid the radicalization surrounding Roussef's reelection to a second term, an unannounced visit to Brazil by Venezuelan Minister for Communities and Social Movements Elias Jaua led to an information exchange agreement in agro-ecology between the MST and the Venezuelan government. The visit and resulting agreement created tension among the conservative in the Brazilian Congress; Senator and landowner Ronaldo Caiado describing the agreement as "an arrangement between a high-placed representative of a foreign government and an unlawful entity, aimed at building a socialist society". The movement described Caiado's reaction as evidence that "conservative sectors are hostile to any form of grassroots participation [in the political process]".

During November 2014, and the radicalization around Roussef's reelection, an unannounced visit to Brazil by the Venezuelan Minister for Communities and Social Movements Elias Jaua led to an agro-ecology information exchange agreement between the MST and the Venezuelan government. The visit and resulting agreement created tension among the conservative in the Brazilian Congress; Senator and landowner Ronaldo Caiado describing the agreement as "an arraa clearly more conservative stance on land reform, and therefore, less maneuvering room for the MST. Rousseff chose for her second-term cabinet the notorious female landowner Kátia Abreu, an even clearer sign of limited room. However, some suggested that the ongoing tension between the MST and the PT, far from signaling an impending end, on the contrary suggests a reconfiguration of the MST, from a single-issue movement to wider focus on political and social emancipation. Such a tendency has been expressed in the integration, since the 1990s, of MST with various other grassroots organization in a network sponsored by progressive Catholics, the CMP (Central de Movimentos Populares, or Union of Popular Movements) through which the MST developed its collaboration with its urban "sister" organization, the MTST.

Land ownership

Consolidation of land ownership continued unabated. In 2006, according to the property census, the Gini index of land concentration stood at 0.854, while at the beginning of military regime, in 1967, it was at 0.836. In other words concentration of land ownership into just a few hands actually increased. Current Brazilian economic policy especially in foreign exchange, relies on trade surpluses generated by the agricultural exports, so "the correlation of forces moves against agrarian reform". The resumption of sustained general economic growth in the Lula years might have greatly diminished social demand for land reform, especially among the informally and/or under-employed urban workers who form most of the movements' later membership. In a recent interview a member of the MST national caucus, Joaquim Pinheiro, declared that the recent increase in welfare spending and employment levels had had a "sobering" influence on Brazilian agrarian activism, but he declared himself in favor or government spending on social programs, adding that the MST feared however that people would become "hostages" to such programs. But as of 2006, according to the MST, 150,000 families lived in its encampments, compared to 12,805 families in 1990.

Organizational structure

The MST is organized entirely, from the grassroots level up to the state and national coordinating bodies, into collective units that make decisions through discussion, reflection and consensus. This non-hierarchical pattern of organization, reflecting liberation theology and Freirean pedagogy, also avoids distinct leadership that can be bought off or assassinated. The basic organizational unit, 10 to 15 families living in an MST encampment settlement, is known as a nucleo de base. A nucleo de base addresses the issues faced by member families, and members elect two representatives, one woman and one man, to represent them at settlement/encampment meetings. These representatives attend regional meetings, and elect regional representatives who then elect the members of the state coordinating body of the MST, a total of 400 members of state bodies—around 20 per state—and 60 members of the national coordinating body, around 2 per state. Every MST family participates in a nucleo de base, roughly 475,000 families, or 1.5 million people. João Pedro Stédile, economist and author of texts on land reform in Brazil, is a member of the MST's national coordinating body.

The MST is not a political party and has no formal leadership other than a dispersed group of some 15 leaders, whose public appearances are scarce. This secrecy minimizes the risk of arrest and also for preserving a grassroots, decentralized organizational model. This is regarded as an important strategy by the MST, in that it allows the movement to maintain an ongoing and direct flow of communication between member-families and their representatives. Coordinators are aware of the realities faced by member-families and are encouraged to discuss important issues with said families. This organizational blueprint seeks, in a way to empower people politically by having them acting "in the way they see fit, true to local context". To assist with communication between Coordinators and member-families, and as an attempt to democratize the media, the MST produces the Jornal Sem Terra and the MST Informa.

The structure and goals of the MST has led some authors to consider it a large libertarian socialist, or anarchist organisation.

Ideology

The MST is an ideologically eclectic rural movement of hundreds of thousands of landless peasants (and some who live in small cities) striving for land reform in Brazil. The MST has been inspired since its inception by liberation theology, Marxism, the Cuban Revolution, and other leftist ideologies. The flexible mix of discourse that includes "marxist concepts, popular religion, communal practices, citizenship principles and radical democracy", has increased the movement's popular appeal.

The landless say they have found institutional support in the Catholic Church's teachings of social justice and equality, as embodied in the activities of Catholic Base Committees (Comissões Eclesiais de Base, or CEBs) which generally advocate liberation theology and anti-hierarchical social relations. This theology, a radicalized re-reading of the existing social doctrine of the Church, became the basis of the MST's ideology and organizational structure. The loss of influence of progressives in the later Catholic Church, however, has reduced the closeness of the relationship between the MST and the Church as such.

MST's anti-hierarchical stance stems from the influence of Paulo Freire. After working with poor communities in the rural Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Freire observed that aspects of traditional classrooms, such as teachers with more power than students, hindered the potential for success of adults in adult literacy programs. He determined that the students' individual abilities to learn and absorb information were severely impeded by their passive role in the classroom. His teachings encouraged activists to break their passive dependence on oppressive social conditions and become engaged in active modes of behaving and living. In the mid-1980s the MST created a new infrastructure for the movement, directly guided by liberation theology and Freirian pedagogy. They did not elect leaders so as to not create hierarchies, and to prevent corrupt leadership from developing.

The MST has widened the scope of their movement. They have invaded the headquarters of public and multinational institutions, and begun to resist the appearance of fields of genetically modified crops, carrying out marches, hunger strikes and other political actions. The MST cooperates with a number of rural worker movements and urban movements in other areas of Brazil. The MST also remains in touch with broader international organizations and movements that support and embrace the same cause. The MST includes not only landless workers stricto sensu, or rural workers recently evicted from the land, but also the urban jobless and homeless people who want to make a living by working on the land; thus its affinity with housing reform and other urban movements. The squatters' movement MTST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem teto - Homeless Workers' Movement) is commonly seem as an offshoot of the MST.

Ideological foundations of MST's later activism

This supposed opposition to capitalist modernity on the part of the movement has led authors to ascertain that the MST activities express, in a way, the decline of a traditional peasantry, and its desire of restoring traditional communal rights. - which would the difference between the MST and a movement for the preservation of such communal rights as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

Others, however, say that, instead of expressing the "decline" of the peasantry, the MST, developing as it was in Brazil, a country where agriculture since colonial times was tied to commodity production, expresses the absence of a proper peasantry and has as its social basis a rural working class striving at granting a toehold in the field of capitalist production. As remarked by non-specialist foreign onlookers, the MST's tagging of the landless as "rural workers" - i.e. proletarians in the Marxist sense - appears sometimes more as a purely ideological branding than anything else.

According even to a Leftist scholar like James Petras, the MST is undoubtedly a modernizing social movement, in that his main goal is to convert fallow states into viable units producing a marketable surplus - "to occupy, resist and produce", as the movement's own motto goes. It is also not a movement with a clear-cut anti-capitalist stance, as what it seeks is to "create a land reform based on small individual property-owners". As far as its steads are concerned, the movement has adopted a mostly private enterprise-friendly stance: with the monies it has procured, it has financed mechanization, processing enterprises, livestock breeding, as well as granting access to additional credit sources. Some even see the movement's aims as "quite limited" as in practice it tends to merely provide a chance for some people "to interact with the [ruling] capitalist economy" by means of a kind of "guerrilla capitalism", aimed at ensuring that smaller producers associations carve a share of the market for agrarian produce as against the competition of mammoth agribusiness trusts.

In the view of Marxist authors as Petras and Veltmeyer, such a stance would reflect the incapacity of a heterogeneous coalition of rural people to engage in a broad anti-systemic coalition which would include the urban working classes. Shunning this Marxist paradigm, other authors see in the rhetoric of the MST the reflection of an ideological struggle, not for taking power, but for recognizance, for "reconstituting the diversity of rural Brazil". This struggle for recognizance - despite its being couched in fiery radical rhetoric - is seen by some as "indeed relevant for the democratization of 'rural society', but [it does] not entail political motivations destined to promote ruptures". In even more blunt terms, a recent academic paper asserts that the ideology of the MST, connected as it is in practice with the landlesss' concrete needs for making out a living in the countryside, is above all an edible ideology. A recent German handbook describes the MST as a mere pressure group, unable to exert actual political power. Other authors, however, maintain that the interest of the MST in maximize its members' everyday participation in the running of their own affairs is enough to describe the movement as "socialist" in a broad sense.

Education

According to the MST, it taught over 50,000 landless workers to read and write between 2002 and 2005. It also runs the Popular University of Social Movements (PUSM) at a campus in Guararema, São Paulo. Also called Florestan Fernandes School (FFS), after Marxist scholar Florestan Fernandes, the school offers secondary school classes in a variety of fields; its first graduating class (2005) of 53 students received degrees in Specialized Rural Education and Development. With the University of Brasília, the government of Venezuela and Via Campesina, as well as agreements with federal, state and community colleges, it offers classes in pedagogy, history, and agronomy, and technical subjects at different skill levels. The building was constructed with by brigades of volunteers using soil cement bricks made onsite at the school. The late Oscar Niemeyer designed an auditorium and further sustainable, low environmental impact expansion of the school complex is pending.

The MST formed its education sector in Rio Grande do Sul in 1986, a year after its first national convention. By 2001, about 150,000 children attended 1,200 primary and secondary schools in its settlements and camps. The schools employ 3,800 teachers, many of them MST-trained. The movement has trained 1,200 educators, who run classes for 25,000 young people and adults. It trains primary-school teachers in most states of Brazil, and partners with international agencies such as UNESCO, UNICEF and the Catholic Church. Seven institutions of higher education in different regions provide degree courses in education for MST teachers. Some call MST communal schools markedly better than their onventional counterparts in rural communities, in both quantitative and qualitative terms.

Media coverage

The role of the MST as a grassroots organization running charter schools activity has attracted considerable attention from the Brazilian press, much of it accusatory. Veja, Brazil's largest magazine, known for unrestrained hostility to social movements in general published a profile of two MST schools in Rio Grande do Sul and said the MST was "indoctrinating" children between 7 and 14. Children were also shown what she called propaganda films, which taught that genetically modified (GMO) products contain "poison", and were advised not to eat margarine that might contain GMO soybean. The Brazilian authorities allegedly had no control over MST schools, and according to the profile they did not follow the mandatory national curriculum set out by the Ministry of Education, which calls for "pluralism of ideas" and "tolerance". "Preaching" "Marxism" in MST schools was analogous to preaching radical Islam tenets in madrassas, the article said.

This was just one episode in a long history of mutual very bitter animosity between Veja and the MST. In 1993, the magazine described the MST as "a peasant organization of Leninist character" and charged its leaders and activists with pretending to be homeless. In February 2009 the magazine opposed public support for the "criminal" activities of the movement and the MST charged the magazine a year later with "vandalizing" both journalism and the truth itself. A recent mention of the MST in Veja called it "a criminal mob". In early 2014, after MST to tried to invade the STF building, a Veja columnist described said it was "playing leader to a non-existing cause". This journalistic mud-slinging has justified at least two academic monographs wholly dedicated to it alone.

Overall the relationship of the mainstream media with the MST has been ambiguous: in the 1990s they tended to support land reform as a goal in general, and presented MST in a sympathetic light. For example, between 1996 and 1997 TV Globo broadcast a telenovela O Rei do Gado (The Cattle Baron), in which a beautiful female sem terra played by actress Patricia Pillar falls in love with a male landowner. In the same telenovela, a wake for the fictitious Senator Caxias, killed while defending an MST occupation, offered the opportunity for two real-life senators from the PT, Eduardo Suplicy and Benedita da Silva, to make cameo appearances as themselves praising their fictive colleague's agenda.

The media however tend to disavow what they see as violent methods, especially as the movement gathered strength. It does not outright disavow the movement's struggle for land reform, but Brazilian media moralize: "to deplore the invasion of productive land, the MST's irrationality and lack of responsibility, the ill-using of distributed land parcels and to argue for the existence of alternate peaceful solutions".

Sustainable agriculture

The increased importance of the technicians and experts within the MST has led some sections of the movement to strive to develop and diffuse technology suitable for a model of sustainable agriculture on the land the families farm. Such self-developed technology is seen as a way to turn small producers from consumers into producers of technologies, - and therefore as a hedge against small producers' dependence on chemical inputs and single-crop price fluctuations and a way to preserving natural resources. These efforts are gaining in importance as more movement families gain access to the land. For example, the Chico Mendes Center for Agroecology, founded May 15, 2004 in Ponta Grossa, Paraná, Brazil on land formerly used by the Monsanto Company to grow genetically modified crops, intends to produce organic, native seed to distribute through MST. Various other experiments in reforestation, taming of native species and medicinal uses of plans have been carried out in MST settlements.

In 2005, the MST partnered with the federal government of Venezuela, and the state government of Paraná, the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), and the International Via Campesina, an organization that brings together movements involved in the struggle for land from all over the world, to establish the Latin American School of Agroecology. The school, located in an MST agrarian reform project known as the Contestado settlement, signed a protocol of intentions in January during the fifth World Social Forum.

See also

• Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa
• The Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee in India
• The EZLN in Mexico
• Fanmi Lavalas in Haiti
• The Homeless Workers' Movement in Brazil
• Movement for Justice en el Barrio in the United States of America
• Narmada Bachao Andolan in India
• Naxalites in India
• La Via Campesina

References

• Patel, Raj. "Stuffed & Starved" Portobello Books, London, 2007
• Wolford, Wendy. "This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil." Duke University Press, Durham, 2010. ISBN 0-8223-4539-0
• Wright, Angus, and Wendy Wolford. To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil. Food First Books, Oakland, 2003. ISBN 0-935028-90-0
• Carter, Miguel.The MST and Democracy in Brazil. Working Paper CBS-60-05, Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford, 2005. Available at [45]. Retrieved November 2, 2014
• Ramos, Tarso Luis. Brazil at the Crossroads: Landless Movement Confronts Crisis of the Left. 2005.
• —, "Agroecology vs. Monsanto in Brazil", Food First News & Views, vol. 27, number 94, fall 2004, 3.
• Branford, Sue and Rocha, Jan. Cutting the Wire: The story of the landless movement in Brazil. 2002. Latin American Bureau, London.
• Questoes Agrarias: Julgado Comentados e Paraceres. Editora Metodo, São Paulo, 2002.