Foundation 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 total farm land, 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 to make way for construction of a
hydroelectric dam. 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 , 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 trade-unionism 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 has not maintained 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 enough political leverage to turn occupations into formal expropriations 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.
1995–2005 Cardoso government Brazil has long history of violent land conflict. During the 1990s, the MST emerged as the most prominent land reform movement in Brazil, and in 1995–1999, led a first wave of occupations which resulted in violence. The MST, landowners, and the government accused each other of the killings, maimings, and property damage. In the notorious
Eldorado de Carajás massacre in 1996, nineteen MST members were gunned down, and another 69 were 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 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, and a
combine harvester, tractor, and several pieces of furniture were destroyed. MST members also drank all the alcohol at the farm. Later, 16 MST leaders were charged with theft, vandalism, trespassing, kidnapping, and resisting arrest. In 2005, two undercover police officers investigating cargo truck robberies near an MST homestead in Pernambuco were attacked. One was shot dead, and the other tortured; MST was suspected to be involved. Throughout the early 2000s, the MST occupied functioning facilities owned by large corporations, whose activities it considered at odds with the social function of property. On 8 March 2005, the MST invaded a
nursery and a research center in
Barra do Ribeiro, 56 km (34.8 mi) 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 agrobusinesses that partook in "the project of organization of agriculture by transnational capital allied to capitalist farming"—a model he deemed 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 focused mainly on 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. In July 2000, this principle was the impetus for MST to mobilize and lead farmers in an attack against a ship loaded with GM
maize from
Argentina that was docked in
Recife. Since 2000, much of the movement's activism consisted in symbolic acts in opposition of multinational corporations, as "a symbol of the intervention politics of the big monopolies operating in Brazil." A possible reason contributing to the change in strategy might have been the perceived shift in government stances in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Cardoso government declared that Brazil "had no need" for land reform, that small farms were not competitive, and were unlikely to increase personal
incomes in rural areas. He believed that it would be better to create skilled jobs, which would cause the land reform issue to recede into the background. Cardoso denounced the MST's actions 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 bank robbery. In a memoir written after he left office, Cardoso expressed sympathy for land reform, stating, "were I not President, I would probably be out marching with them," but also countering, "the image of mobs taking over privately-owned farms would chase away investment, both local and foreign." Although Cardoso himself never branded the MST as terrorists, his Minister of Agricultural Development did, and even hypothesized that the MST invaded
Argentina from the north in order to blackmail the Brazilian government into action. In July 1997, Senior General Alberto Cardoso, Cardoso's Chief of Military Household (
Chefe da Casa Militar, among other things, 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 a plot to "destabilize" the military. In terms of concrete measures, Cardoso's government's approach to land reform was divided: while the administration simultaneously acquired 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 main land reform project, supported by a
World Bank US$90 million loan, was addressed to
individuals who had experience in farming, and a yearly income of up to US$15,000; they 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 willing landholder. Thus, this programme catered primarily to substantial small farmers, not to the MST's traditional constituency—the rural poor. Cardoso's project,
Cédula da Terra ("landcard"), did offer previously landless people the opportunity to buy land from landowners, but in a negotiated process. In the words of an American scholar, despite its efforts in resettlement, the Cardoso government did not confront the prevailing mode of agricultural production: concentrated, mechanized, latifundia-friendly commodity production—and the resulting injustices. In his own words, what Cardoso could not accept about the MST was what he saw not as a struggle for land reform, but a wider struggle against the capitalist system. Therefore, Cardoso's administration tried to initiate tamer social movements 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 (SDS). By contrast, MST leaders emphasized that their practical activity was a response to the poverty of so many people who had little prospects of productive, continuous work in conventional labor markets. This reality was admitted by President Cardoso in a 1996 interview: "I'm not going 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." In 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." In Stedile's view, the existence of the large underclass should not be held against the working class character of the movement, because many rural working class had been "absorbed" into the periphery of the urban proletariat. Such a view is shared by some academic authors, who argue that, behind its avowedly "peasant" character, the MST, as far as class politics is concerned, is mostly a
semi proletarian movement, consisting of congregations of 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 divisions of labour. MST somewhat filled the void left by the decline of the organized labor movement in the wake of Cardoso's neoliberal policies. Therefore, the movement took steps to ally with urban struggles, especially those connected to housing. João Pedro Stedile stated that the struggle for land reform would unfold in the countryside, but would be decided in the city, where "political power for structural change" resided.
2005–2010 Lula government and March for Agrarian Reform The Lula government was seen by the MST as a leftist and therefore friendly government, so MST decided to shun occupations of public buildings in favor of actions against private landed states, in a second wave of occupations starting in 2003. However, the Lula government's increasingly conservative positions, 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 the
Monsanto Company in the state of
Goiás. On 7 March 2008, a similar action by women activists at another Monsanto facility in
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 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 was already 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 intensive use of
pesticides. Stedile later called Monsanto one of the ten transnational companies that controlled virtually all international agrarian production and
commodity trading. Similarly, 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,
Brasília. 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 to allocating the human and financial resources to accomplish this. He also committed to a range of related reforms, including an increase in the pool of land 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 argued 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 as "reform," when it was simply a form of
welfarism (
assistencialismo) that was unable to change the productive system. The leaders presented Lula with 16 demands, including economic reform, greater public spending, and public housing. In interviews with
Reuters, many of the leaders said they still regarded Lula as an ally, but demanded that he accelerate his promised land reforms. However, in September of that year, João Pedro Stedile declared that, in terms of land reform, 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 to officially define the MST as a "terrorist organization" were also 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. However, as stated by a German author, the Lula government year after year proposed a blueprint for land reform that was regularly blocked 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
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 18 April 2005, some 3,000 relatives protested prevailing conditions in São Paulo's 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 hearsay, and an attempt to criminalize the movement. In the wake of
9/11, Brazilian media tended to describe the MST as "terrorists," lumping it together loosely with various historical and mediatic happenings in keeping with an international post-9/11 trends of relegating 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." In late 2005, a parliamentary inquiry commission, where landowner-friendly congressmen held a majority, classified the MST's activities as terrorism, and the MST itself as a criminal organization. However, its report met no support from the PT members of the commission, 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, [and] 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 the availability of land for small agricultural production, called by some as "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 who were working with the state's military police issued a report, charging the MST with collusion with international terrorist groups. The report was used in state courts, according to
Amnesty International, to justify eviction orders carried out by the police with "excessive use of force." The group of attorneys made public a previously classified report by the Council of Public Attorneys of Rio Grande do Sul, and asked 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 27 September – 7 October 2009, the MST occupied an orange plantation in
Borebi, State of São Paulo, owned by orange juice multinational
Cutrale. The corporation claimed to have lost R$1.2 million (roughly US$603,000) in damaged equipment, missing pesticide, destroyed crops, and trees cut by MST activists. In response, the MST declared the farm to be government property that was illegally embezzled by Cutrale, and that the occupation was intended to protest this, while the destruction was done by provocateurs. Such questioning of the legality of existing private property by denouncing landowners as holding land in
adverse possession was 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 blocked highways and railroads, to create calls for public attention to the plight of landless workers.
2010–2018 The MST wholeheartedly declared support for
Dilma Rousseff's candidacy, and 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," that is, a purely humanitarian one. As Lula's chief of staff, she supported economic growth over ecological and land reform concerns. In a radio interview during the campaign, she repeated the old conservative trope 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." State agencies and private individuals continued to violently oppose the movement's activities. 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.On 16 April 2012, a group of MST activists occupied the headquarters of the
Ministry of Agrarian Development in Brasília, 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 with 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 "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, MST attempted only 110 occupations. The same year saw another low, with only 159 families resettled. MST National Coordinator João Paulo Rodrigues said that the federal government's reliance on
agribusiness exports for procuring
hard currency was the main reason the Rousseff administration did not advance land reform, and even went backwards in some cases. The only recent advances in land reform policies had come in programs, such as the National Program for School Meals (PNAE) and Food Catering Plan (PAA), which purchased food from land reform farmers for use at public schools and other government facilities. However, Rodrigues disputed that such programs were "entirely disproportionate to what [was being offered [in terms of public money, subsidized credits, etc.] to agribusiness." He concluded that 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 hampered aggressive policies of expropriation and land reform. In November 2014, amid the radicalization surrounding Rousseff's reelection, 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 agreement created tension among the conservatives in the Brazilian Congress; Senator and landowner
Ronaldo Caiado described it as "an arrangement between a high-placed representative of a foreign government and an unlawful entity, aimed at building a socialist society," and argued for a clearly more conservative stance on land reform, and therefore, less maneuvering room for the MST. The movement described Caiado's reaction as evidence that "conservative sectors are hostile to any form of grassroots participation [in the political process]." In an even clearer sign of limited room, Rousseff chose
Kátia Abreu, the notorious female landowner, to be a member of her second-term cabinet. However, some have suggested that the ongoing tension between the MST and the PT, far from signaling an impending end, on the contrary, suggested a
reconfiguration of the MST, from a single-issue movement to one with a wider focus on political and social emancipation. Since the 1990s, such a tendency has been expressed in the integration of MST with various other grassroots organizations 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.
2018–present MST helped organize the
Lula Livre Vigil advocating for the release of
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from prison. During the
Jair Bolsonaro presidency, MST shifted focus from land occupations to agricultural production and built alliances with urban progressives. Following the re-election of Lula, MST resumed its unused land occupations. The commission never produced a final report. ==Land ownership==