The Movimento Sem-Terra in Brazil

Historical Roots of the MST

Brazil is one of the most unequal societies on the planet--1% of landowners own 44% of all Brazilian land (an area larger than the continental United States). Understanding the history and social implications of that inequality is essential background for understanding the situation of the landless in Brazil today.

Starting in 1964, when a military coup established an economic and political model for the county that persist to the present day, agriculture and agricultural policy in Brazil has undergone dramatic changes. Following that model, Brazil is subordinate to the interests of international finance capital at the expense of the Brazilian people, most notably, the Brazilian poor. In Brazil, the poorest of the poor historically have been "os sem-terra"--the landless, a nickname given to the social class of rural workers who work land without having title to it. They work as tenant farmers, agricultural workers on large fazendas (plantations) cultivating crops for export, or as migrant workers. In total, there are 4.8 million landless workers in Brazil today.

During the period of the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1984, Brazil fiercely pursued a new model of agro-industrial development with a goal of bringing about the "modernization" of Brazilian agriculture. Rural policies favored large-scale, export-oriented production to the detriment of small-scale, family farming. During these years of "modernization," the Brazilian countryside became the site of violent conflict, as socioeconomic inequality in the rural areas increased. Because the model of modernization preserved the historic concentration of land in the hands of the very few and very privileged (Brazil is one of the few countries in the world that has never undergone agrarian reform), the historic struggle over land intensified. Violent expulsion of working families from land became increasingly common as local elites sought to secure the interests of agribusiness and "progress" in the countryside. The result: millions of peasant farmers and their families were forced from their lands in Brazil's rural areas during the decades of military dictatorship.

The impact of these policies extended to all of Brazilian society, which underwent a profound transformation. Between 1965 and 1985 Brazil went from a 75% rural society to 75% urban. Literally half of the population migrated toward Brazilian cities in search of a better life, chasing the promise of salaried work in the rapidly industrializing urban centers. While some found viable work, many more did not, as the cities could not support the influx of workers brought by the massive rural-urban exodus. For masses of migrants, rural poverty became urban misery. The legacy of the "modernization" plans of the 1960's and 70's is found not only among the 4.8 million landless families in the Brazilian countryside, but it is also evident in the sprawling favelas (shantytowns) encircling every major Brazilian city, typically accounting for 25-50% of a city's total population.

The Rise of the Landless Movement (MST)

Brazil's MST emerged out of this context and has developed into the most important social movement in the country. Indeed, the MST is the largest social movement in Latin America and one of the most successful land reform movements in the world. The movement is premised on the Land Statute in the Brazilian constitution--a set of laws that require that land in Brazil fulfill a "social function." According to federal law, land must either be cultivated for production (and worked in compliance with labor and environmental regulations) or held for environmental preservation. Otherwise, the land is "illegal." Thus, the statute effectively outlaws holding large tracts of land for speculation. The Land Statute was the product of decades of grassroots organizing and was finally enacted in 1965, a year after the military dictatorship seized control of the capitol. This Statute went to the root of land inequality, but as MST leader Ubiraci Stesko explains: "With the coup in 1964, the agrarian reform program was pigeonholed. The movements of the era and their leaders were assassinated, or exiled. From 1964 to around 1984, everything stood still; no settlements were made."

In 1978 and '79 sectors of the Catholic Church, following the tradition of liberation theology that affirms the rights of the poor and dispossessed, began to organize landless workers through the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT). By the mid-1980's, as the federal government prepared for transition to electoral democracy, the CPT and other segments of civil society began to discuss the need for an autonomous movement focused on the struggle for land reform. They hoped to unite the isolated local efforts that were erupting throughout the Brazilian countryside. In 1984, 1500 representatives from 16 of Brazil's 27 states met in Cascavel, Parana and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Rural Workers Movement) or MST was born. Organized around the slogan "land for those who work it," MST established three primary goals: 1) immediate access to land for landless families through nonviolent occupation of unproductive land; 2) national agrarian reform including both the redistribution of land and the creation of policies that would develop and sustain rural families. Because the first two goals could not be accomplished without fundamental changes to the structure of Brazilian society, the third goal was more general, but no less urgent: 3) a more just society. The movement began to develop an organizational structure that would allow it to mobilize landless workers to occupy and settle land according to the provisions of the Land Statute, but "The movement did not begin with the law to fight for land," according to an MST lawyer from the state of Pernambuco. "The movement began with the concrete necessity of workers for food, for work, for living conditions that are minimally dignified."

MST Enters New Era: New Challenges

Through its use of nonviolent land occupations and mass mobilizations, the MST has emerged as one of the most powerful players in the mounting global challenge to international financial institutions and their corporate agenda. By the time the Zapatistas took the international community by storm on January 1, 1994, with armed actions in the Mexican state of Chiapas, the MST commemorated ten years as an autonomous social movement. In its first decade, the MST had settled thousands of families nonviolently throughout the country and it continued the struggle for government-run schools and health clinics in those communities.

With the massacre of 19 members of the MST at Eldorado das Carajas in 1996, the movement entered a new phase. This massacre represented a culmination of persistent and escalating violence by local police, private militia, and military toward rural workers of the MST. When the government failed to respond to these violent acts, the MST took their struggle to the international community. The National March for Justice Employment and Land Reform arrived at the nation's capital, Brasília, on April 17, 1997, and was greeted by more than 100,000 people. On the one-year anniversary of the massacre, delegations of marchers came from all corners of the country, having organized in just over a month's time. The Campaign Against Impunity, which included these efforts, attracted the attention of human rights organizations around the world. It gave rise to a new human rights sector of the MST and significantly elevated the struggle for land in Brazil before the international community. With over 1,000 rural workers killed in land conflicts since 1985, violence in rural Brazil has not yet declined, but the massacre at Eldorado das Carajas brought a new sense of international solidarity with the MST. With increased international attention came a greater expectation of accountability from the federal government to respect human rights.

As decentralized and local acts of violence became a less viable means of counteracting the MST, the federal government, together with others interested in maintaining Brazil's unequal land distribution, sought other ways of discrediting the MST. Perhaps the most persistent form of attack against the MST has come through the media which misrepresents and often fabricates stories to mislead the Brazilian and international public. A more insidious form of attack against the MST comes through infiltration by the intelligence agencies.

The MST suffered an economic blow with the removal of lines of credit accessible to small farmers. In April 1997, the World Bank proposed, and Brazil's federal government approved, a $90 million U.S. pilot program, known as the Cédula da Terra or "Land Bank," as a free market alternative to land reform through expropriation. The plan was this: large landowners would sell land to the World Bank at its market value; in turn, the World Bank would grant loans to landless farmers to purchase these same lands. The catch? The "invisible hand" of the market gives large landowners an incentive to sell only the most marginal territories--rocky, hilly land that is difficult to cultivate or otherwise develop. In effect, powerful landowners are compensated for their socially irresponsible, illegal landholdings--ultimately taking away the government's responsibility to its people.

Meanwhile, the landless--the supposed beneficiaries of the project--are left deep in debt. A pilot project reported that the majority of recipients of Land Bank loans did not even understand the terms of the loans granted. While the FHC government has insisted that the Land Bank was "a compliment to agrarian reform," critics suggest otherwise. "The World Bank started to do agrarian reform because the social pressure [for more dramatic change] would be too great if they didn't," explains sociologist Janaine Souza from Brasilia. "If they initiate the process of agrarian reform, they can claim that the process has already begun, and that you need to be patient until the process comes to completion. So they finance [the Land Bank], not with the intention of true agrarian reform, but to maintain social order."

As one MST leader says: "We defend the World Bank's money for agrarian reform, but to put it where? Into settlements, infrastructure, education. Why? Because 70% of peasants in Brazil are illiterate. Why doesn't the World Bank put this money into literacy for them? If that were the case, we would borrow and pay with no problem! It's not that the MST is against the World Bank's money. On the contrary, we favor it, but it should be applied transparently for social programs including health, education, production, agro-industry. But to use the public's money, or another country's money--including the American people's--to come to Brazil and put it toward large landowners and corruption? No way!"

The MST believes that free-marketers, supporting the international agro-business, will claim that the inevitable failure of the Land Bank program is evidence of the economic lack of viability of today's family farms. In the meantime, the Land Bank pales in comparison to the overall improvements in standards of living on MST settlements brought about by MST education and literacy programs, health education, art and culture, courses and training in agricultural techniques, and access to credit and start-up capital through MST rural cooperatives. Many who would otherwise be unsympathetic to the MST's goals, including local business people and political leaders have recognized the MST settlements for their success and economic viability. An MST leader from Brasilia explains: "Agrarian reform settlements organized by the MST produce more than other settlements and have the best structure in Brazilian agriculture today. Why? Because we have developed a very strong process of internal agricultural cooperation. We educate peasants in a way that they learn how to organize production and survive in this exploitative economy at a level superior to others."

"Let's Globalize Hope, Let's Globalize the Struggle!" -Via Campesina slogan

MST has established itself as a key player in networks posing the greatest challenge to the current global economic order. These networks include the worldwide network of peasants' movements Via Campesina, the Latin America Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC), and the "anti-globalization" movement against corporate globalization and its "free trade" economic agenda that has manifest itself though a wave protests across the globe from Seattle to Genoa to Quebec City. The MST has also linked with an effort to organize working and poor people in the United States and Canada called the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign spearheaded by the Philadelphia-based Kensington Welfare Rights Union. The MST marched in the 400-mile March of the Americas in 1999 from Washington, DC to the United Nations in New York to protest poverty across the continent as a human rights violation. The MST has also been at the forefront in organizing the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Today, MST is at the forefront of the hemispheric, indeed international, effort to stop the passage of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The proposed trade agreement would bind 35 of 36 countries in the Western Hemisphere (except Cuba) under the dogma of neo-liberalism in a replica of NAFTA that would include 800 million people, creating the largest trade agreement in world history. At the anti-FTAA protest in Quebec City in April 2001, the MST was hard to miss. Members held a picnic with the notorious Jose Bové (of the French farmers group Confédération Paysanne) to denounce genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and performed MST songs on stage to show, once again, that the MST is a cultural movement. The MST is a leader in the fight against the FTAA.

As awareness grows in the "developed" world about food safety issues and organic foods, MST's critique of conventional agricultural production sidesteps much of the controversy. For members of MST, "organic" food is not a luxury or a marketing gimmick. It is a necessity for the farmer's health, the sustainability of the land for future generations, and for the health of the consumer. For family farmers, these three concerns are inseparable. "In the beginning, when we were working with agrochemicals, those who worked the fields were getting sick," recounts Jandyra Guarneri, the director of a 26-family MST farming cooperative in the state of Parana, in southern Brazil. "This is why we made the change to organic. There was no other way. The change was difficult technically, and expensive at first. But we saw an improvement in the health of the whole community--especially the children--as we began to consume foods produced without agrochemicals."

The movement has articulated its opposition to GMO's with the same clarity. The uprooting of "experimental" fields of GMO soybeans planted by Monsanto in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul sent a message that reverberated through all of South America: the cultivation of GMO crops will not be tolerated by the MST. GMO's have not undergone sufficient testing for their long-term effects, nor have they been subject to public debate. Further, they pose a real threat to both small producers and consumers. By contrast, the MST has championed seeds as the heritage--and therefore common property--of humanity, not corporations. The MST's vigilance in their resistance to GMO foods serves as an inspiration to their allies and sympathizers throughout the world, including those in the U.S. and Canada. "They [the activists of the MST] are so far ahead of us down there," says Niel Ritchie of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, about the Brazilian anti-GMO campaign. "We have so much to learn from their public relations effort, how they've managed to educate and communicate with the public on this issue."

For more information on the Friends of the MST, please contact: Dawn Plummer, Program Coordinator, 2017 Mission Street, #303, San Francisco, CA 94110, dawn@mstbrazil.org, (415) 255-7296, fax (415) 255-7498, www.mstbrazil.org.