Landless Workers' Movement - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Landless Workers' Movement is a social movement

Social movement

Social movements are a type of group action. They are large informal groupings of individuals or organizations focused on specific political or social issues, in other words, on carrying out, resisting or undoing a social change....

in Brazil

Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

; it is the second (or, according to others, the first) largest social movement in Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

with an estimated 1.5 million landless members in 23 out of Brazil's 26 states. The MST states it carries out land reform

Land reform

[Image:Jakarta farmers protest23.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Farmers protesting for Land Reform in Indonesia]Land reform involves the changing of laws, regulations or customs regarding land ownership. Land reform may consist of a government-initiated or government-backed property redistribution,...

in a country it sees as mired by unjust land distribution. It organizes landless and impoverished farmers to realize their civil rights

Civil rights

Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...

. The MST fights for access to land on behalf of the dispossessed. They demand the restoration of a social contract that provides a sustainable way of life for the poor living in rural areas.

The MST claims land occupations are rooted in the most recent Constitution of Brazil

Constitution of Brazil

During its independent political history, Brazil has had seven constitutions. The most recent was ratified on October 5, 1988.-Imperial Constitution :Background...

(1988), by interpreting a passage which states that land property should fulfill a social function. It also claims, based on 1996 census statistics, that just 3% of the population owns two-thirds of all arable land

Arable land

In geography and agriculture, arable land is land that can be used for growing crops. It includes all land under temporary crops , temporary meadows for mowing or pasture, land under market and kitchen gardens and land temporarily fallow...

in the country.

Constitutional justification

Historically, the first statute that regulated landed property in independent Brazil was the Landed Property Act (Lei de Terras) or Law number 601, enacted on September 18, 1850. Being drafted in a process of transition from a colonial administration based on Portuguese feudal law - in which property depended on both Crown's grants (sesmarias) and primogeniture

Primogeniture

Primogeniture is the right, by law or custom, of the firstborn to inherit the entire estate, to the exclusion of younger siblings . Historically, the term implied male primogeniture, to the exclusion of females...

(morgadio) - to a national bourgeois independent Brazilian state, the law established that the standard mode for acquiring landed property was to be by means of a money purchase - either from the State, or for a previous private owner - and as such strongly limited opportunities to exercise squatter's right, therefore favouring the historical concentration of landed property that became one of the hallmarks of modern Brazilian social history (see http://www.klepsidra.net/klepsidra5/lei1850.html). Historically, the Lei de Terras favoured economies of scale by means of land concentration, at the same time creating serious difficulties for small planters and peasants to have access to the land in order to practice subsistence agriculture as well as small scale farming.

Since concentration of landed property was tied to the development of a capitalist Brazilian economy, opposition to the existing property structure by insurrectional means had, during the 19th and early 20th century, the character of a vindication of older property forms, by means of an ideology centered on a fabled, millenarian return to feudal order, as was the case in the 1890s Canudos War and the 1910s Contestado War

Contestado War

The Contestado War , broadly speaking, was a guerrilla war for land between settlers and landowners, the latter supported by the Brazilian state's police and military forces, that lasted from October 1912 to August 1916....

.Throughout the later Republican history of Brazil, there were continuous episodes of peasant resistance to evictions and land-grabbing by powerful ranchers (Teófilo Otoni

Teófilo Otoni

Téofilo Otoni is a city in northeast Minas Gerais state, Brazil. The population of the municipality was 126,895 in 2007 and the area is 3,253.4 km².-Origin of the name:...

, Minas Gerais

Minas Gerais

Minas Gerais is one of the 26 states of Brazil, of which it is the second most populous, the third richest, and the fourth largest in area. Minas Gerais is the Brazilian state with the largest number of Presidents of Brazil, the current one, Dilma Rousseff, being one of them. The capital is the...

, in 1948; Porecatu

Porecatu

Porecatu is a city in Paraná State, Brazil, located at around , at the margins of the Paranapanema River. Its economy is mainly based on agriculture with the sugarcane being the most important product.The city is served by Porecatu Airport.-History:...

, Paraná

Paraná (state)

Paraná is one of the states of Brazil, located in the South of the country, bordered on the north by São Paulo state, on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, on the south by Santa Catarina state and the Misiones Province of Argentina, and on the west by Mato Grosso do Sul and the republic of Paraguay,...

, in 1951; South-west Paraná, in 1957; Trombas

Trombas

Trombas is a small town and municipality in north Goiás state, Brazil.-Location:Trombas is located in the extreme north of the state, between Formoso and Montividiu do Norte. It is east of the regional center, Porangatu....

, Goiás

Goiás

Goiás is a state of Brazil, located in the central part of the country. The name Goiás comes from the name of an indigenous community...

, 1952–1958); but those were mostly local affairs that were repressed or settled according to local conditions and didn't give rise to an alternative ideology to "modernizing" agrobusiness.

Conversely, all later attempts at land reform by legal means, starting with the 1960s organization of peasant leagues

Peasant leagues (Brazil)

Peasant leagues were social organizations composed of sharecroppers, subsistence farmers, and other small agriculturalists. They originated in the agreste region of Northeastern Brazil in the 1950s...

(Ligas Camponesas) in Northeastern Brazil which opposed mostly eviction of peasants from rented plots and transformation of plantations into cattle ranches, would be nationally directed by a tendency to counter the existing landed property structure by means of a more rational appeal to the allegedly social function of property. Nowadays, it is argued that undeniable development of a highly dynamic and economically well developed agricultural business was furthered at the price of extensive social exclusion of the rural poor. According to MST's ideologues, the allgedly efficiency gained by this arrangement was by no means general, as since 1850 Brazilian landed property management was tied to the particular interests of a single class - the rural bourgeoisie. Although the MST explains its actions directly in socio-economic terms, it still points to Canudos (and its allegedly millenarism) as a legitimizing episode, a way to justify its existence in an historical perspective, as well as a means to develop a powerful mystique of its own.

As much of the driving force at the early organizing of the MST came from Catholic base communities, much of the MST ideology and actual practice are rooted on the principle, taken from the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, that private property should serve a social function - a principle developed during the XIXth. Century, and made into Catholic official doctrine since Pope Leo XIII

Pope Leo XIII

Pope Leo XIII , born Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci to an Italian comital family, was the 256th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, reigning from 1878 to 1903...

's Rerum Novarum
Rerum Novarum
Rerum Novarum is an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on May 15, 1891. It was an open letter, passed to all Catholic bishops, that addressed the condition of the working classes. The encyclical is entitled: “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour”...

encyclical; on the eve of the 1964 military coup, that was the principle evoked by President João Goulart

João Goulart

João Belchior Marques Goulart was a Brazilian politician and the 24th President of Brazil until a military coup d'état deposed him on April 1, 1964. He is considered to have been the last left-wing President of the country until Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in 2003.-Name:João Goulart is...

in his famous "Central rally" (a mammoth rally held in Rio de Janeiro, near to the city's greatest railroad station, where the president made a speech offering a blueprint for various political and social reforms) when proposing the expropriation of estates of more than 600 hectares in area situated at the vicinity of federal facilities (roads, railroads and reservatoirs as well as sanitation works)- a move that triggered the strong conservative resistance leading to Goulart's downfall. Nevertheless, this same principle would be formally acknowledged by the Brazilian Catholic hierarchy in 1980, when the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB) would issue a document - Church and Land Problems - recognizing and pleading for public acknowledgement of communal rights to the land.

In Brazilian constitutional history, land reform - understood in terms of public management of natural resources - was first explicitly mentioned as a guiding principle for government action in the text of the Constitution of 1967 (Article 157, III), which wanted to institutionalize a political authoritarian consensus in the wake of the 1964 coup. In 1969, during the most repressive phase of the military dictatorship, the same constitutional text was amended by a decree (ato institucional) of the military junta that held interim power during the last illness of the military President Arthur da Costa e Silva, in order to authorize government compensation for land expropriated for purposes of land reform to be made in government bonds, instead of cash, as had been formerly the only legally admitted practice (Art.157, § 1º, as amended by Institucional Act no.9, 1969).

Following the same principles, the present Brazilian 1988 constitution also requires that land serve a social function. (Article 5, XXIII.) As such, the constitution requires the Brazilian government to "expropriate for the purpose of agrarian reform, rural property that is not performing its social function." (Article 184.)

According to Article 186 of the constitution, the 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.
Exploitation which favors the well-being of the owners and workers.

Since such requirements are vague and not objectively defined, however, the acceptance of the "social interest" principle for land reform into the Constitution was seen as a mixed blessing, in that the principle was accepted in general, but under constraints - introduced by landowners' lobbying, organized since 1985 at the landowners' organization named União Democrática Ruralista

União Democrática Ruralista

União Democrática Ruralista is a Brazilian right-wing association of farmers and activists. In English, the party's name means "Democratic Association of Ruralists"...

(Democratic Union of Rural People, or UDR for short) whose rise and organization paralled that of the MST, and that, even after self-dissolving in the early 1990s, is believed to still exist in the form of informal regional ties between landowners. UDR lobbying over the constitutional text is believed to have watered down the "social interest" principle as far as concrete enforcement was at stake.

The MST identifies what it believes to be unproductive rural land that does not meet its social function and occupies it, through a strategy of continuous and massive occupations throughout the entire national territory, afterwards moving to ascertain the legality of the occupations.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 of civil society co-founded by Darci Frigo, the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Human Rights Award

Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award

The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award was created by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial in 1984 to honour individuals around the world who show courage and have made a significant contribution to human rights in their country....

Laureate. The courts might eventually issue a warrant requiring the occupiers' families to leave, or to refuse the landowners' request and allow the families to stay and engage provisionally in subsistence farming until the federal agency responsible for agrarian reform, Brazil's National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian reform (INCRA), is able to determine if the occupied property is, indeed, unproductive. The MST's legal activity bases itself on the idea that, since property rights are in a continuous process of social construction, engaging in litigation and trying to striking sympathies among members of the Juditiary are essential to the legitimacy of the movement and to have its claims for citizenship granted. Traditionally, Brazilian courts tend to side with the landowners and charge MST members with offences quoted by some as "frivolous and bizarre", but there are many individual judges who have shown themselves sympathetic to the movement Brazilian higher courts have usually regarded the MST with reserve: in February 2009, for instance, the then President of the Brazilian Supreme Court, Gilmar Mendes

Gilmar Mendes

Gilmar Ferreira Mendes is a Brazilian Justice of the Supremo Tribunal Federal , since being appointed by then President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 2002...

, declared the MST to engage in "illicit" activities, opposed granting of public monies to it, and supported an "adequate" judicial response towards land occupation.

History

The smashing of the peasant leagues in the wake of the 1964 coup opened the way for a process of commercialization of agriculture and ensuing landed property concentration that proceeded unabated throughout the military dictatorship and expressed itself in an absolute decline of the rural population during the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, out of a grand total of 370 million hectares of farm land, 285 million hectares (77%) were held by latifundia

Latifundia

Latifundia are pieces of property covering very large land areas. The latifundia of Roman history were great landed estates, specializing in agriculture destined for export: grain, olive oil, or wine...

. The redemocratization process during the 1980s, however, allowed for grassroots movements to pursue their own interests as against the state and the ruling classes, and it is into this framework that the emergence of the MST fits.

Beginning in December 1980 and early 1981, over 6,000 landless families established an encampment on a portion of land located between three unproductive estates in Brazil's southern-most state of Rio Grande do Sul

Rio Grande do Sul

Rio Grande do Sul is the southernmost state in Brazil, and the state with the fifth highest Human Development Index in the country. In this state is located the southernmost city in the country, Chuí, on the border with Uruguay. In the region of Bento Gonçalves and Caxias do Sul, the largest wine...

. These families which included part of 600 families that had previously been expropriated and dislocated in 1974 from neighbourling Passo Real for the construction an hydroeletric dam who had been joined by some other 300 families in an invasion of the Indian Reserve in Nonoai. Local mobilization of the Passo Real and Nonoai people had already achieved some land distribution outside the reservation, followed by demobilization. It were those who had not received land from these claims, joined by others, and led by the same leaders from the already existing reginal movement MASTER (Rio Grande do Sul landless farmers' movement), who eventually came to compose 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 forces led by an officer notorious for his past experience in counter-insurgency, refused the alternative of being resettled on the Amazonian frontier, and eventually pressured the Military Government into expropriating nearby lands for the purposes of agrarian reform. Most of the early development of the MST concerned exctly 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 as a response to the growing difficulties posed by agribusiness to the reproduction of family farming.By the same token, the MST developed at the time what was to be its chief modus operandi: its organizing around local, concrete stuggles of an specific demographic group.

The MST was officially founded in Januery 1984, during a National Encounter of landless workers in Cascavel

Cascavel

Cascavel is a city and municipality in western Paraná state, Brazil. The population is 296.975 inhabitants.The city is on a plateau 781 meters above sea level...

, Paraná, as Brazil's Military dictatorship

Military dictatorship

A military dictatorship is a form of government where in the political power resides with the military. It is similar but not identical to a stratocracy, a state ruled directly by the military....

came to a close. The founding process itself was very much connected with Catholic Church base organizations such as 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 1960s Peasant Leagues, who sought to address the issue of land reform strictly by legal means, by favoring tradeunionism and striving after corporatist concessions to rural workers. However, the more aggressive tactics of the MST allowed it to gather a capital of political legitimacy that soon outshone CONTAG, who was allowed to linger a shadowy existence as a mere rural branch to the trade union central CUT

Central Única dos Trabalhadores

-See also:*Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores*Força Sindical-External links:...

, while MST monopolized political attention as overall rural workers' representative. From the 1980s until today, the MST hasn't enjoyed 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, it is the MST who is by far the most organized group dealing in occupations, enjoying political leverage enough to turn occupation into formal expropriation for public purposes: already in 1995, out of 198 occupations carried out, 89 (45%) were organized by the MST, but these included 20,500 (65%) out of the grand total of 31,400 families involved.

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 orgazation, reflecting Liberation Theology & Freirean pedagogy influences, was also dictated by the actual need to avoid clear-cut leaderships that could be bought off or assassinated. The basic organizational unit, representing 10 to 15 families living in either an MST encampment or MST settlement ("encampment" standing for a non-legally recognized occupation, "settlement" for an already recognized one) is known as a 'Nucleo de Base' in Portuguese. A Nucleo de Base is responsible for addressing the issues faced by the member-families, and members elect two representatives, one woman and one man, to represent them at settlement/encampment meetings. These same elected representatives attend regional meetings, where they elect regional representatives who then vote for members of the State Coordinating Body of the MST. In total, there are 400 members of the MST's State Coordinating Bodies (+/- 20 per state) and 60 members of the MST's National Coordinating Body (+/- 2 per state). It is important to point out that every MST family participates in a Nucleo de Base, and that this represents roughly 475,000 families, or 1.5 million people. João Pedro Stédile, economist and author of several important 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 secretive mood allows for minimizing risks of arrest and also for preserving a grassroots, decentralized organizational model.This is an important strategy of the MST and serves 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.

Ideology

The MST is an ideologically eclectic rural movement of hundreds of thousands of landless peasants (and some who live in small cities) striving to achieve land reform

Land reform

in Brazil

Brazil

. The MST has been inspired since its inception by liberation theology

Liberation theology

Liberation theology is a Christian movement in political theology which interprets the teachings of Jesus Christ in terms of a liberation from unjust economic, political, or social conditions...

, Marxism

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

, the Cuban Revolution

Cuban Revolution

The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...

, and a variety of other leftist ideologies. That flexible mix of a discourse including "marxist concepts, popular religion, communal practices, citizenship principles and radical democracy", has increased the movement's power of attraction

The landless claim to have found institutional support in the Catholic Church through their teachings of social justice and equality, as embodied in the activities of Catholic Base Committees (Comissões Eclesiais de Base, or CEBs for short) which in general advocate liberation theology

Liberation theology

Liberation theology is a Christian movement in political theology which interprets the teachings of Jesus Christ in terms of a liberation from unjust economic, political, or social conditions...

and more specifically anti-hierarchical social relations. This theology became the basis of the MST’s founding ideologies and organizational structure. The loss of influence of progressives in the later Catholic Chrurch, however, has reduced the closeness of the relationship between the MST and the Church as such.

MST was further influenced to be a movement of anti-hierarchical stance through the teachings of Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and influential theorist of critical pedagogy.-Biography:...

. After working with poor communities in the rural Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Freire observed that aspects of traditional classroom structures, such as teachers being more powerful than the students, were hindering the potential for success in adults participating in adult literacy programs. He determined that the students’ individual abilities to independently learn and absorb information were severely stalled due to their passive positions in the classroom. His teachings were used to encourage the activists to break passive dependence on oppressive social conditions and become engaged in active modes of behavior and condition. 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.

The MST has widened the scope of their movement by organizing more than just encampments and occupations of large farms. They have invaded the headquarters of public and multinational institutions. Their actions began to include fighting to eliminate fields of genetically modified crops and the carrying out marches, hunger strikes and other political actions. MST acts have damage the agricultural economy of productive regions of Brazil. The MST is not only invested in fighting against struggle in Brazil and neighboring Latin America, but also cooperates with a number of rural worker movements and urban movements in other areas of Brazil. The MST also continues to remain in touch with broader international movements in other countries that embrace the same cause. The MST congregates not only landless workers strictu sensu - that is to say rural workers or people recently evicted from the land - but also urban jobless and homeless people who want to make a living by working in the land, therefore its affinity with movements concerned with urban and housing reform.

Education

According to the MST, it has taught over 50,000 landless workers to read and write between the years 2002 and 2005. The MST also owns a Popular University of Social Movements (PUSM)- also called Florestan Fernandes School (FFS), from its campus in Guararema

Guararema

Guararema is a municipality in the state of São Paulo in Brazil. The population in 2006 was 24,818, with a density of 91.7 inh./km² and the area is 271 km². This place name comes from the Tupi language. It is a suburb of São Paulo....

, São Paulo

São Paulo

São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, the largest city in the southern hemisphere and South America, and the world's seventh largest city by population. The metropolis is anchor to the São Paulo metropolitan area, ranked as the second-most populous metropolitan area in the Americas and among...

, named for the marxist scholar Florestan Fernandes

Florestan Fernandes

Florestan Fernandes was a Brazilian sociologist and politician. He was also elected federal deputy twice.- Life and career :...

- which offers various classes on the secondary (i.e., high school

High school

High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....

) level in a variety of fields: its first graduating class received its degrees in Specialized Rural Education and Development in 2005. These 53 graduates had participated in five stages of specialization, each of which lasted 20 days. In total, they spent 600 hours in study/class. Along with the Specialization Course, a partnership with the University of Brasília

University of Brasília

The University of Brasília , is one of the largest and most prestigious Brazilian public universities funded by the Brazilian federal government...

, the Government and Via Campesina, over 40 agreements were developed with Federal, State and Community Colleges to hold an array of thematic courses (i.e., Pedagogy

Pedagogy

Pedagogy is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching. The term generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction....

, History

History

History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

, Agronomy

Agronomy

Agronomy is the science and technology of producing and using plants for food, fuel, feed, fiber, and reclamation. Agronomy encompasses work in the areas of plant genetics, plant physiology, meteorology, and soil science. Agronomy is the application of a combination of sciences like biology,...

) as well as technical courses of different skill levels.http://www.mst.org.br/informativos/minforma/ultimas1346.htm. The FFS building was erected by means mostly of voluntary labor performed by work brigades employing soil cement

Soil cement

Soil cement is a construction material, a mix of pulverized natural soil with small amount of portland cement and water, usually processed in a tumble, compacted to high density...

bricks made on the school's premises. Oscar Niemeyer

Oscar Niemeyer

Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho is a Brazilian architect specializing in international modern architecture...

will be designing the Auditorium Building that will be part of the school's complex. http://www.mstbrazil.org/?q=educationsector

The MST formed its education sector in Rio Grande do Sul

Rio Grande do Sul

in 1986, a year after its first national convention. By 2001, about 150,000 children were enrolled in 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 courses for 25,000 young people and adults. It trains primary-school teachers in most states, and has set up partnerships with international agencies, such as UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

and UNICEF, as well with the Catholic Church. It reached agreement with seven institutions of higher education in different regions to provide degree courses in education for MST teachers. Some scholars agree that these MST communal schools tend to be markedly better than its conventional counterparts in rural communities, in both quantitative and qualitative terms.

Media Coverage

The role of the MST as a grassroots organization engaged in "charter schools" activity has attracted considerable attention from the Brazilian press, much of it accusatory. In an issue of the magazine Veja
Veja (magazine)
Veja is a Brazilian weekly newsmagazine published in São Paulo and distributed throughout the country by the media conglomerate Grupo Abril. It is the leading weekly publication in the country, and one of the most influential outlets of the Brazilian press...

, Brazil's largest (known for its militant hostility against social grassroots movements in general) dated September 8, 2004, titled "The MST's Madrassas", journalist Monica Weinberg tells about her visiting of two of the MST's schools in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. In her report, the MST is said to be "indoctrinating" children between the ages of 7 and 14 - a conclusion reached by the journalist after a quote from the MST publication "Education Notebook, no. 8" stating that one of the MST's stated goals for the children is to "develop class and revolutionary conscience". According to the same story, children in the schools were also shown what the journalist calls propaganda

Propaganda

Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....

films, and were allegedly taught that GMO

GMO

A GMO is a genetically modified organism.GMO may also refer to:* Gell-Mann–Okubo mass formula in particle physics* General Medical Officer, a designation for United States Army soldiers* Generalised molecular orbital theory, in chemistry...

products contain "poison" and told not to eat margarine

Margarine

Margarine , as a generic term, can indicate any of a wide range of butter substitutes, typically composed of vegetable oils. In many parts of the world, the market share of margarine and spreads has overtaken that of butter...

for fear of containing GMO soybeans. The conclusion reached by Ms. Weinberg was such as the Brazilian government has no control over most of the schools, and that they do not follow the curriculum set forth by the Ministry of Education which calls for "pluralism of ideas" and "tolerance". In the journalist's analysis, the allegedly "preaching" of Marxism

Marxism

in these schools is to be taken as analogous to the preaching of radical Islam

Islam

Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...

found in Middle-Eastern Madrassas.http://veja.abril.com.br/080904/p_046.html

There is a long history of mutual and very bitter animosity between the MST and Veja: already in 1993, the magazine described the MST as "a peasant organization of leninist

Leninism

In Marxist philosophy, Leninism is the body of political theory for the democratic organisation of a revolutionary vanguard party, and the achievement of a direct-democracy dictatorship of the proletariat, as political prelude to the establishment of socialism...

character" and charged its leaders and activists with faking a homeless condition. This accusatory stance only raised pitch throughout the years: in February 2009, one finds the magazine opposing public support to the "criminal" activities of the movement and the MST in turn, for instance, charging the magazine, a year later, with "vandalizing" both journalism and truth itself. In its latest mention to the MST, Veja calls it outrightly "a criminal mob". This case-history in journalistic mud-slinging has justified the writing of at least two academic monographies wholly dedicated to it.

In general, the relation of mainstream media towards the MST has been ambiguous: 1990s media tended to support the goal of land reform in general and to present it under a sympathetic light. One ready example is provided by the fact that, between 1996 and 1997, TV Globo broadcast the telenovela

Telenovela

A telenovela is a limited-run serial dramatic programming popular in Latin American, Portuguese, and Spanish television programming. The word combines tele, short for televisión or televisão , and novela, a Spanish or Portuguese word for "novel"...

O Rei do Gado ("The cattle baron"), where a beautiful female sem terra, played by actress Patricia Pillar

Patrícia Pillar

Patrícia Pillar is a Brazilian television and film actress.-Biography:Patrícia Gadelha Pillar was born in Brasília, Distrito Federal to Nuno Pillar and Lucy Gadelha...

, fell in love with a male landowner. In the same telenovela, the wake

Wake (ceremony)

A wake is a ceremony associated with death. Traditionally, a wake takes place in the house of the deceased, with the body present; however, modern wakes are often performed at a funeral home. In the United States and Canada it is synonymous with a viewing...

of the fictive Senator Caxias, killed while defending an MST occupation, offered the opportunity for two real senators from the Workers' Party, Eduardo Suplicy

Eduardo Suplicy

Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy is a Brazilian left-wing politician, economist and professor. He is one of the founders and main political figures on the Workers Party of Brazil .-Biography:...

and Benedita da Silva

Benedita da Silva

Benedita Souza da Silva Sampaio, is a Brazilian politician. During her life she faced a lot of prejudice for her humble origin, but she overcame the adversities and was Governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro and, later, Minister of State in the Government of Luiz Inacio Lula da...

, to make cameo appearances as themselves praising their fictive colleague's agenda. The same media, however, tends to disavow what it sees as the MST's violent methods - a trend that became more markedly as the movement gathered strength.

Sustainable agriculture

The increased importance of technicians and experts within the MST has led some sections of the movement to strive to develop and diffuse technology suitable with a model of sustainable agriculture

Sustainable agriculture

Sustainable agriculture is the practice of farming using principles of ecology, the study of relationships between organisms and their environment...

on the lands the families farm. Such self-developed technology is seem as a means for turning small produceres from consumers to producers of technologies - and therefore as a hedge against small producers' dependence on chemical inputs and single-crop price fluctuations These efforts are gaining increasing importance as movement families gain access to the land. For example, the Chico Mendes Center for Agroecology, founded May 15, 2004 in Ponta Grossa

Ponta Grossa

Ponta Grossa is a city in the state of Paraná, Brazil. With a population of over 315,000 inhabitants, it is the 4th most populous city of Paraná.It is the second industrial pole of the State, exceeded only by Curitiba—the State's capital and largest city...

, Paraná

Paraná (state)

, Brazil on land formerly used by Monsanto Company to grow genetically modified crops, intends to produce organic

Organic farming

Organic farming is the form of agriculture that relies on techniques such as crop rotation, green manure, compost and biological pest control to maintain soil productivity and control pests on a farm...

, native seed

Seed

A seed is a small embryonic plant enclosed in a covering called the seed coat, usually with some stored food. It is the product of the ripened ovule of gymnosperm and angiosperm plants which occurs after fertilization and some growth within the mother plant...

to distribute through MST. Various other experiments in reforestation, taming of native especies and medicinal uses of plant life have been carried around the MST settlements.

In 2005, the MST partnered with the Federal Government of Venezuela

Venezuela

Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...

, and the State Government of Paraná, the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), and the International Via Campesina

Via Campesina

Via Campesina describes itself as "an international movement which coordinates peasant organizations of small and middle-scale producers, agricultural workers, rural women, and indigenous communities from Asia, Africa, America, and Europe"...

(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 is located within an MST agrarian reform project known as the Contestado settlement. The protocol of intentions for its creation was signed in January during the fifth World Social Forum

World Social Forum

The World Social Forum is an annual meeting of civil society organizations, first held in Brazil, which offers a self-conscious effort to develop an alternative future through the championing of counter-hegemonic globalization...

Violent confrontations: the 1990s and early 2000s

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

In a notorious example, during the 1996 incident usually called Eldorado dos Carajás massacre, 19 MST members were gunned down (another 69 wounded) by police while they were blocking a state road in Pará

Pará

Pará is a state in the north of Brazil. It borders the Brazilian states of Amapá, Maranhão, Tocantins, Mato Grosso, Amazonas and Roraima. To the northwest it also borders Guyana and Suriname, and to the northeast it borders the Atlantic Ocean. The capital is Belém.Pará is the most populous state...

.http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u551569.shtml In 1997 alone, similar confrontations with police and landowners' thugs accounted for two dozen internationally acknowledged deaths.

In 2002, the MST occupied the family business farm of then-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso

Fernando Henrique Cardoso

Fernando Henrique Cardoso – also known by his initials FHC – was the 34th President of the Federative Republic of Brazil for two terms from January 1, 1995 to December 31, 2002. He is an accomplished sociologist, professor and politician...

http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/imf/brasil/mst/2002/0324mst_action.html in the state of Minas Gerais

Minas Gerais

, in a move which was publicly condemned by then Left opposition leader Lula

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , known popularly as Lula, served as the 35th President of Brazil from 2003 to 2010.A founding member of the Workers' Party , he ran for President three times unsuccessfully, first in the 1989 election. Lula achieved victory in the 2002 election, and was inaugurated as...

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u31238.shtml and other preeminent members of the PT Party

Workers' Party (Brazil)

The Workers' Party is a democratic socialist political party in Brazil. Launched in 1980, it is recognized as one of the largest and most important left-wing movements of Latin America. It governs at the federal level in a coalition government with several other parties since January 1, 2003...

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u31194.shtml http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u30653.shtml. The farm was damaged and looted in the occupation. Damage included the destruction of a combine harvester

Combine harvester

The combine harvester, or simply combine, is a machine that harvests grain crops. The name derives from the fact that it combines three separate operations, reaping, threshing, and winnowing, into a single process. Among the crops harvested with a combine are wheat, oats, rye, barley, corn ,...

, a tractor and several pieces of furniture.http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u30607.shtml The MST members also drank the entire stock of alcoholic beverages at the farm. Overall, 16 leaders of the MST were charged with theft, vandalism, trespassing, resisting arrest and for holding others in captivity.

In 2005, two police officers who were working under cover in the investigation of cargo truck robberies in the vicinity of an MST stead in the state of Pernambuco

Pernambuco

Pernambuco is a state of Brazil, located in the Northeast region of the country. To the north are the states of Paraíba and Ceará, to the west is Piauí, to the south are Alagoas and Bahia, and to the east is the Atlantic Ocean. There are about of beaches, some of the most beautiful in the...

were assaulted by criminals, one being shot dead, and another tortured, something that raised suspicions about whether the perpetrators were MST members or not.http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u67074.shtml.

Throughout the early 2000s, in addition to the incidents described above and to various episodes of occupying derelict farms and public buildings, the MST occupied functioning facilities owned by large corporations whose activities it considers to be at variance with the principle of the social function of property. On March 8, 2005, the MST invaded a nursery

Nursery (horticulture)

A nursery is a place where plants are propagated and grown to usable size. They include retail nurseries which sell to the general public, wholesale nurseries which sell only to businesses such as other nurseries and to commercial gardeners, and private nurseries which supply the needs of...

and a research center in Barra do Ribeiro

Barra do Ribeiro

-See also:*List of municipalities in Rio Grande do Sul...

, 56 km from Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre is the tenth most populous municipality in Brazil, with 1,409,939 inhabitants, and the centre of Brazil's fourth largest metropolitan area . It is also the capital city of the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. The city is the southernmost capital city of a Brazilian...

, both owned by Aracruz Celulose. The MST members held the local guards captive while they proceeded to rip the plants from the ground. MST's president João Pedro Stédile said at the time that MST should oppose not only landowners as such but also agrobusiness, "the project of organization of agriculture by transnational capital allied to capitalist farming" - a model he deems as socially backwards and environmentally harmful http://www.direitos.org.br/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3561&Itemid=2. Or, in the words of an anonymous activist: "our struggle is not only to win the land...we are building a new way of life". Such a new trend had been developing since the movement's 2000 national congress, which concerned itself chiefly with the perceived threat offered by transnational corporations (Brazilian or foreign) to both small property in general as well as to Brazilian national food sovereignty, specially in the field of intellectual property.It was this principle that led to the July 2000 MST's attacking of a ship in Recife containing GM maize from Argentina.

Such a change in strategy could also have corresponded to a perceived shift in government's stances as during the late 1990s and early 2000 various spokespersons for the Cardoso government tended to consider that Brazil had no need for land reform, that small property was non-competitive, unlikely to raise personal incomes in rural areas and therefore a foolhardy alternative to politics that emphasized creation of skilled wage-labor positions, as the expansion of general employment levels would eventually cause the land reform issue to "recede" into the background. The MST's actions where branded by Cardoso as aiming at a throwback to an archaic agrarian past, and therefore at variance with "modernity" - "one of the enabling myths of the neoliberal discourse".

In fact, although Cardoso offered lipservice to agrarian reform in general, he also described the movement as "a threat to democracy". Cardoso also compared the MST's demands for subsidized credit, that had led to the 1998 occupation of various bank premises in the State of Paraná by activists, to someone "who enters a bank as a robber". In a memoir written after his term, Cardoso expressed sympathy for land reform, stating that "were I not President, I would probably out marching with them", but also that "the image of mobs[sic] taking over privatly owned farms would chase away investment, both local and foreign".

As far as concrete measures were concerned, Cardoso's stance towards land reform was divided: at the same time it took steps to accelerate publics 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 disbursment of public funds to people involved in such invasions. Cardoso's chief land reform project, supported by a World Bank

World Bank

The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes.The World Bank's official goal is the reduction of poverty...

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 for substantial small farmers, as opposed to the MST's traditional constituency, the rural poor. But then, 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.

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". And, 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.

Therefore also the fact, admitted by some authors, that the MST activities express, in a way, the decline of a traditional peasantry wanting to preserve ancient communal rights. - which is the difference between the MST and a movement for traditional communal rights such as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation

Zapatista Army of National Liberation

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation is a revolutionary leftist group based in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico....

.Others 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. According to a Leftist author like James Petras

James Petras

James Petras is a retired Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada who has published prolifically on Latin American and Middle Eastern political issues.-Academic and...

, 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 machanization, 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".

The Lula government and the 2005 March for Agrarian Reform

The beginning of the Lula government was regarded by the MST as the beginning of a Left and therefore friendly government, the movement deciding 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 taken by the government, including a low profile stance on land reform (out of a promised grand total of 430,000 resettled families, Lula had managed to actually settle a mere 60,000 in the first two years of his administration, actually less than what had been achieved by Cardoso during his first term) decided the movement to change stance already in early 2004, when it began to occupy, again, public buildings and Banco do Brasil

Banco do Brasil

Banco do Brasil S.A. is the largest Brazilian and Latin American bank by assets, and the third by market value. The bank, headquartered in Brasília, was founded in 1808 and is the oldest active bank in Brazil — and one of the oldest financial institutions in the world.Banco do Brasil is controlled...

agencies.

In June 2003, the MST also occupied the R&D farm of Monsanto Company in the state of Goiás

Goiás

Goiás is a state of Brazil, located in the central part of the country. The name Goiás comes from the name of an indigenous community...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2961284.stm. On March 7, 2008, a similar action was performed by women activists in another Monsanto facility at Santa Cruz das Palmeiras

Santa Cruz das Palmeiras

Santa Cruz das Palmeiras is a municipality in the state of São Paulo in Brazil. The population in 2004 was 27,473 and the area is 296.57 km². The elevation is 635 m....

, in the state of São Paulo, where a nursery and an experimental patch of genetically modified maize were destroyed, slowing ongoing scientific research. MST claimed to have destroyed the research facility to protest the government's support for the extensive use of GMOs supplied by transnational corporations in agriculture: Already in 2003,Lula had authorized the legal using and sale of GM soybeans, which led MSt's Stedile to label him a "transgenic politician".And, indeed, the dominance of transnationals over Brazilian seed production was expressd by the fact of the Brazilian hybrid seed industry being in the early 2000s already 82% Monsanto-owned. The MST views this state of affairs as detrimental to the development of organic agriculture as well as offering the possibility of a future health hazard in spite of enhanced economic activity.Monsanto was later targeted by MST leader Stedile as one of the ten transnational companies controling virtually the whole of international agrarian production and commodities trading.

After an exchange of barbs between Lula and Stedile over what the President saw as the unnecessary radicalization of the movement's demands, the MST decided for a huge national demonstrarion: in May 2005, after a two week, 200-odd kilometer march from the city of Goiânia

Goiânia

-Climate:The city has a tropical wet and dry climate with an average temperature of . There's a wet season, from October to April, and a dry one, from May to September. Annual rainfall is around 1,520 mm....

, nearly 13,000 landless workers arrived in their nation's capital, Brasilia

Brasília

Brasília is the capital city of Brazil. The name is commonly spelled Brasilia in English. The city and its District are located in the Central-West region of the country, along a plateau known as Planalto Central. It has a population of about 2,557,000 as of the 2008 IBGE estimate, making it the...

. 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 that was disputed by the MST. The movement claimed that 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

Reuters

Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...

, 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 being left in abeyance through non-enforcing. 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.

The MST resumes direct action: from 2005 on

Lula's election to the Presidency raised the hypothetical banner of active government support to land reform, to which conservative Midia reacted by means of increased efforts towards branding the MST's activities as felonies.In May 2005, the MST was reported by the Veja

Veja (magazine)

Veja is a Brazilian weekly newsmagazine published in São Paulo and distributed throughout the country by the media conglomerate Grupo Abril. It is the leading weekly publication in the country, and one of the most influential outlets of the Brazilian press...

magazine to have helped the PCC

Primeiro Comando da Capital

Primeiro Comando da Capital, or PCC , is an anti-establishment Brazilian prison gang and criminal organization founded in 1993 by inmates of Taubaté prison in São Paulo...

, the most powerful prison-gang criminal organization in the State of São Paulo. The evidence offered by the magazine was a Police phone tap

Telephone tapping

Telephone tapping is the monitoring of telephone and Internet conversations by a third party, often by covert means. The wire tap received its name because, historically, the monitoring connection was an actual electrical tap on the telephone line...

recording depicting a conversation between PCC leaders during which one of the members of the gang said that he had "just talked with the leaders of the MST" who were going to "give instructions" to the gang http://veja.abril.com.br/110505/p_106.html about the better way of staging what was to be the largest prisoner's relatives protest in Brazilian history, on April 18, 2005, with more than 4,000 prisoners' relatives protesting against prevailing conditions in São Paulo State correctional facilities. The MST "leaders" to which the tape refers were not named. No MST activist, actual or alleged, intervened in the taped conversations. The MST denied the link with a formal written statement implying the supposed evidence offered was only hearsay, supplied as an attempt to criminalize the movement.It's commonly assumed that the MST's activities are continuously surveyed by military intelligence.Association by proxy between the MST and terrorist movements is assumed by various intelligence organs, Brazilian as well as foreign, the MST itself being regarded as a source of "civil unrest".

In late 2005, a parliamentary inquiry commission where landowners-friendly congressmen had a majority issued a report classifying the activities of the MST as "terrorist" and the movement itself as a criminal organization. The report, however, met with no support from the Workers' Party MPs in the commission, a senator ripping 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".

In April 2006, the MST broke into the farm of Suzano Papel e Celulose

Suzano Papel e Celulose

Suzano Papel e Celulose is a Brazilian company of pulp and paper belonging to the Suzano Group, with presence in over 80 countries and offices in Buenos Aires, Fort Lauderdale, London, Shanghai and Signy and one of the largest in Latin America.The company is a leader in the paperboard market in...

, a large maker of paper products, in the state of Bahia

Bahia

Bahia is one of the 26 states of Brazil, and is located in the northeastern part of the country on the Atlantic coast. It is the fourth most populous Brazilian state after São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, and the fifth-largest in size...

, due to the farm having over six square kilometres devoted to eucalyptus

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus is a diverse genus of flowering trees in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae. Members of the genus dominate the tree flora of Australia...

growth. http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u77917.shtml Eucalyptus, a non-native plant, has been blamed for environmental degradation in Northeast Brazil,http://www.brazzilmag.com/content/view/6236/53/, as well as reducing the general avaliability of land for small production, in what is called by some "cornering" of said 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 this wood thieving.

Between September 27 and October 7, 2009, the MST occupied an orange plantation in Borebi

Borebi

Borebi is a municipality in the state of São Paulo in Brazil. The population in 2003 was 2,205 and the area is 349.13 km². The elevation is 590m....

, 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.

During the same period, the MST also repeatedly created roadblocks, blocking highways http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u78096.shtml
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u69159.shtml
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u67747.shtml http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u59971.shtml and railroads http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u61599.shtml.

Present general situation

Although the MST declared wholehartedly support for the candicacy of Dilma Roussef to the Presidency, her declarations after being elected offered the movement very qualified support: in a declaration on national broadcast in November 2010, she declared the land reform issue to be a question "of human rights", i.e., a purely humanitarian one.Dilma's previous record as Chief of Satff to the Presidency was one of support for economic gorwth targets in variance with ecological as well as land reform concerns.

Neverthless, the process of concentration of landed property in Brazil continues unabated: in 2006, according to the latest landed 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- meaning by that that land concentration actually increased. The fact that current Brazilian economic policy - specially as far as foreign exchange is concerned - banks on the existence of trade surpluses generated by the agro-export sector means that "the correlation of forces moves against agrarian reform" as a government policy. Also, with the resumption of sustained general economic growth rates during the Lula years, social demand for land reform might have been greatly diminished.

External links

Website of U.S.-based solidarity movement, Friends of the MST
Website of MST (In Portuguese)
"Brazil: Cutting the Wire" December 13, 2005 Frontline/World
History Did Not End Documentary about the MST (Portuguese/Italian with English Subtitles)
War on Want's MST project page. UK charity War on Want
War on Want
War on Want is an anti-poverty charity based in London, England. It seeks to highlight the needs of poverty-stricken areas around the world and lobbies governments and international agencies to tackle problems as well as raising public awareness of the concerns of developing nations while...

provides support to the organisation
BBC article—Brazil Landless Visit President
biography of Darci Frigo, MST Attorney
Terra de Direitos website
How to be a Good Friend (When You are 4,000 Miles Away) Patrick W. Quirk, Foreign Policy in Focus, September 24, 2007
Website of Ruralistic Democratic Union - Anti-MST movement

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