A movement representing the interests of landless, poor and Indigenous people, using education, direct action, and media to achieve land reform, and understanding its task to resist both social and ecological degradation through extractive agro-business and industry
Context
In Brazil, private land ownership, combined with harmful practices that extract natural resources and exploit people’s labour, has mapped the country along axes of capital accumulation and control. Calls for land reform to democratise space and access to resources grew in the early and mid twentieth century. They included grassroots campaigns led by Leftist activists and peasant leagues in northeastern Brazil who resisted the exploitation of land and people such as tenant evictions and large-scale cattle ranching. Campaigns such as these planted seeds for further organising and activism. But they also met fierce and brutal opposition. Numerous oppressive political regimes, including a period of military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985, suppressed peasant leagues and enabled large-scale plantation and ranching monopolies to develop land from which poor, Indigenous communities were evicted. Violating people’s spatial rights to safe and habitable lands, and the rights of nature itself, these imposed systems of intensive financialised land use constructed rigid and often arbitrary borders to demarcate land ownership, simultaneously damaging ecosystems and communities.
Practice
Building upon grassroots campaigns led by earlier peasant leagues, a coalition of Indigenous people, the Landless Workers’ Movement (in Portuguese: Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST) formed in 1984 to defend their rights to land and self-determination. To this day MST reimagines and realigns governance within living earth systems, calling for a “Just Transition” towards regenerative economies and inclusive democracies. It has over 1.5 million members based across Brazil.
MST’s central objective is land reform through agrarian laws and policies that would give Indigenous people rights to land for growing food and looking after ecosystems. It points towards sections of the Brazilian constitution which indicate that land should have a social function, and defines its goal as exactly that: to unite spatial and social functions of rural land for the common good and the protection of biodiversity.
MST lists barriers for achieving land reform, including racism, sexism, media monopolisation which neglects reporting land disputes, and socio-economic inequality. MST uses direct action strategies including land occupation to reclaim space. It also runs its own schools across primary and secondary ages and in adult and higher education contexts, focusing on issues of social solidarity and ecology.
Through its culture sector, MST fosters international partnerships with artists and researchers to communicate its work to wider audiences. In this context, the photographer Sebastião Salgado worked with MST on his exhibition and book Terra: Struggle of the Landless (1997). Harnessing cultural engagement and global audiences through collaborations with artists like Salgado is a crucial means for MST to increase its impact abroad and harness modern media and communication techniques for direct action.
In the 2000s, the Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso criticised MST for wanting a return to “an archaic agrarian past”. But according to an anonymous member, MST desires land reform to build “a new way of life”. The contrast between these two opinions, one demonising land reform as archaic and the other celebrating it as future-oriented, illustrates the extent of the struggle that continues today between capitalist land owners in Brazil and those who would like to steward the land.
Other Indigenous groups, including Ñambi Rimai in Colombia and Karrabing in Australia, use media in a similar way to raise international awareness and gain support on issues of land dispossession. MST’s aim of replacing territorial borders with ecological boundaries, meanwhile, resonates with eco-political reforms underway in other regions of South America, such as in Chile and Ecuador. These campaigns for ecological protections to accommodate the needs of local communities and more-than-human habitats exemplify strategies for what the Colombian theorist Arturo Escobar calls a “renovation of life”.