Founded in 1984, the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) is today the largest social movement in Brazil and perhaps the best organized grassroots organization in all of Latin America. It is the only movement in Brazil that has successfully built a national organizational structure, and is the first grassroots movement to have effected radical changes in the political priorities of the national government. Though it has been mobilizing rural workers around the issue of agrarian reform since its founding in 1984, only in recent years has it gained wide attention both within Brazil and abroad.
Indeed, it was the widespread media attention focusing on two massacres in 1995 and 1996 that galvanized national and world attention to the struggle of the MST and the more than 300,000 families it claims to represent. The massacre of ten landless workers by military police in Corumbiara, in the state of Rondônia on August 9, 1995, and of 19 landless workers on April 17, 1996, also by military police, in Eldorado dos Carajás, in the state of Pará, were not the first such killings.[1] In fact, over the past 15 years, more than 1,600 Brazilians have been killed in land conflicts, primarily by hired gunmen and increasingly since the mid-1990s, by the military police.[2] But these two massacres drew immediate media attention, provoking a dramatic rise in the profile of the MST and, correspondingly, in its political weight within Brazil. These two tragic events, in effect, mark a turning point in the process of conflict and negotiation between the MST and the Brazilian government.
Perhaps the principal reason the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre in particular became so significant is that it was caught on film by television reporter Marisa Romão and cameraman Osvaldo Araújo, who happened to be caught in traffic on the highway leading to Belém where the demonstration occurred.[3] As one Brazilian scientist noted: “The videotaping of this massacre was the first time that the Brazilian public had seen for itself the violence that has frequently been visited on the Landless Movement.”[4] The Carajás massacre was also a sobering reminder that, nine months after the Corumbiara killings, not a single military police officer had been punished for those deaths. The MST ably took advantage of the sudden prominence of the issue. A month after the Carajás massacre, a massive public demonstration was organized around the motto “Justice Now,” recalling the 1984 campaign directed against the military dictatorship, “Direct Elections Now.”[5] The “Justice Now” campaign, like its predecessor, was widely covered by the media both inside and outside of Brazil.
The massacres thus came to acquire symbolic importance as reminders of the ongoing impunity in Brazilian society, and highlighted the gap between government rhetoric and practice. The massacres occurred at a time when the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995- ) had committed itself to reversing the endemic violence within Brazil, a clear legacy of the 1964-1985 military regime. On September 7, 1995, following the recommendation of the World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna in 1993, President Cardoso promised to draw up a National Human Rights Program, and urged all Brazilian citizens to join the human rights movement. The story of the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre hit the media as the program was being developed, eroding confidence in the government’s commitment to defend human rights.
The killings of Eldorado dos Carajás forced the government to recognize that the problems of human rights violations and agrarian reform were intrinsically linked and could not be resolved independently. In response to the massacre, Cardoso pointed out that the military police and the judiciary are under the control of the states, not the federal government. “If they want the federal government to be responsible,” he said, “then they also must give me the necessary tools.”[6] After complex negotiations between Cardoso and the Congress, two important measures were introduced into the National Human Rights Program, giving him those “tools.” First, federal courts were given jurisdiction over human rights crimes. The second transferred jurisdiction in cases against the military police for “intentional homicide” from military to civilian courts.
Prior to these two tragic events, the MST and the other groups that organize rural settlements and land occupations, such as the Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG), the Federation of Agricultural Workers (FETA), and the Movement of Landless Farmers (MAST), appeared to be isolated in their struggle for land reform. The MST, clearly the best organized of these groups, nevertheless had limited political capacity at the national level until very recently. The organization not only lacked strong ties to larger political institutions such as unions and poli-tical parties; it also had no contact with any international institution which could support its struggle.[7]
In Activists Beyond Borders, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink use the term “advocacy networks” to denote forms of organization characterized by “voluntary, reciprocal and horizontal patterns of communication and exchange.”[8] Major actors in advocacy networks may include national and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), social movements, the media, churches, trade unions and government agencies. One of the obstacles to the emergence of such networks, Keck and Sikkink argue, is disagreement over particular issues by different political and social actors.[9] Agrarian reform has always been an extremely contentious issue in Brazilian politics, and it is difficult to imagine that a network would have emerged around such a divisive issue.
But the killings of Corumbiara and Eldorado dos Carajás changed that. These two massacres—extreme cases of the arbitrary use of state violence in land struggles—were condemned by members of the MST, other civil society groups and state actors, independent of their position on the agrarian reform question.[10] This common condemnation became the basis for the formation of a network involving all these actors, as well as the Catholic Church, and eventually actors at the international level. The most important achievement of this network—of which the MST is just one, albeit a crucial, actor—has been to put agrarian reform on the national agenda. Keck and Sikkink argue that activists in networks try not only to influence policy outcomes, but to transform the terms and nature of the debate.[11] This is exactly what happened with respect to agrarian reform in Brazil. The struggle led by the MST and later echoed by a series of other actors convinced Brazilians that agrarian reform was a complex problem that could not be approached simply on economic grounds and had to be understood as one aspect of a broader strategy aimed at solving many social and political problems in Brazil, such as rural violence and urban unemployment.
The MST claims to represent between 250,000 and 300,000 families that have benefited from agrarian reform in the past 16 years, as well as 70,000 families living in some 500 encampments across Brazil still waiting for land.[12] The movement, which is present in the Federal District and in 22 of Brazil’s 26 states, has exercised pressure throughout the country, producing some significant achievements.[13] For example, during the early years of the Cardoso government, the question of agrarian reform was deadlocked as long as the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform was under the Ministry of Agriculture, which was headed by a conservative landowner, José Eduardo de Andrade Vieira. But sustained MST protest pressured the government to move the issue of agrarian reform from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture to the Special Ministry for Landed Property Policy, where the reform process could move forward.[14] “There is absolutely no doubt that the MST represents a stimulus for government action,” says Secretary of State for Human Rights, José Grégori. “On a scale of one to ten, without the MST, the government would work for agrarian reform at a level of 3.5. But with the MST, the government is working at a level of eight. This intensification of government actions and efforts are, without a doubt, a response to pressure from the MST.”[15]
The MST, suggests Neúri Rossetto, one of its national coordinators, has been particularly good at learning from previous experiences in rural organizing. For example, the Peasant Leagues that organized in the mid-1950s in the northeastern state of Pernambuco remained isolated in that region, leading to their ultimate failure. The MST’s original members therefore saw the national expansion of the movement as a top priority. This, Rossetto explains, required adopting new forms of organization:
First, the struggle had to be massive, that is, it had to incorporate many people; it is impossible for us to occupy land in small numbers because the repression would come and that would be the end of it. Second, we could not have a union style leadership; the logic of a union, with a single president, or a movement with a single leader would not work. This is why we formed, in opposition to the old model, collective leaderships. Our whole organization is collective; whether it is the health sector, the sector for communication or the educational sector; all the sectors and even the national directorate are collective bodies. The third element was the necessity of waging the struggle on the national level.[16]
The formation of the movement was triggered by land struggles which occurred in different southern states starting in 1978, notably in Rio Grande do Sul, where 1,400 families of posseiros—farmers without land deeds—were expelled from the Nonoai reservation by the Kaingang Indians. In a meeting in Chapecó, in the state of Santa Catarina, posseiros from five states in central and southern Brazil created a Provisional Regional Committee, the forerunner of the MST. After a second meeting in January 1984 in Cascável, Paraná, in which posseiros from 12 states participated, the name “Landless Rural Workers’ Movement” was chosen for this incipient rural movement. The MST continued to grow in the following years.
Two factors were essential for the successful creation of a national organizational structure. Perhaps the most significant was the role played by the Catholic Church. Historically, the Catholic Church in Brazil was a conservative institution that supported the status quo—in 1964, for example, it supported the coup d’état by the Brazilian military, which then set about the destruction of the Peasant Leagues. But by the early 1970s, the Brazilian Church became an active agent in favor of social change. After the Second General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate in Medellín, Colombia in 1968, the National Bishops Conference of Brazil (CNBB) issued new, Liberation Theology-inspired directives favoring the “preferential option for the poor.” The Church hierarchy thus began to openly support the work which had already been undertaken by parish priests in the burgeoning Christian base communities, and in 1975 the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) was created. The CPT played a fundamental role in developing contacts between local and regional leaders through a series of meetings between 1975 and 1984, giving a national dimension to land struggles. These meetings culminated in the January 1984 meeting at Cascável. This first national meeting exclusively addressed the situation of landless workers, and is considered to be the founding meeting of the MST. As João Pedro Stédile, a national MST leader noted, the Cascável meeting was crucial in linking disparate activists into a unified social movement, and it was there that the MST’s first agenda was drawn up.[17]
The second important factor contributing to the formation of a national structure is the nature of the leadership and vision of the MST organizers themselves. The three objectives set by the MST at the meeting in Cascável—”Land, Agrarian Reform and a More Just Society”—have remained the core of the movement’s mission, and they have served to galvanize broader social aspirations than earlier rural movements. The Peasant Leagues, for example, were powerful but primarily local in nature. They were formed in reaction to the usurpation of peasant lands by the large sugar plantations, which sought to expand their holdings in response to rising sugar prices on the world market. The Leagues were an effort to resist these changes, but they remained locked in the dynamics of regional grievances and conflict, and proved unable to attract the support of disaffected peasants in other regions of Brazil. By contrast, the MST’s three objectives of “Land, Agrarian Reform and a More Just Society” travel well across the country. They represent not only the aspirations of landless rural workers, but also those of families whose lands were flooded after the building of the Itaipu dam near the Paraguayan border, or migrant workers laboring on the northern plantations.
In addition, the way the MST has structured the participation of its members makes the long-term survival of the movement more likely. Since the movement’s goal is not only to obtain land for landless families, but to pressure for agrarian reform on a national scale, landless MST families are expected to remain actively involved in the movement even after receiving their plots of land. This basic principle of solidarity helps assure support for future land occupations from MST members who have already benefited from the organization’s activities. And this, according to MST leader Rossetto, is obtained through a process of political education:
The rural worker who receives the land continues to participate in the struggle, and this commitment is obtained through political education. For this reason, since the beginning of the movement, there has been a constant preoccupation with assuring that those involved in the struggle for land also have some kind of political awareness.[18]
Education is one of the eight sectors within the MST’s organizational structure. “Political and ideological education” represents one of the four fronts of that sector, along with assistance to new mothers, combined primary and secondary school, and literacy training. Today there are some 1,100 schools in which over 100,000 children are taught by about 3,000 teachers. This emphasis on education—as well as the other sectors within the MST’s organizational structure, such as Communications, Training, Human Rights and International Relations—reveals the extent to which the MST’s concerns go well beyond agricultural production. Each of the organizational structures below the National Congress are replicated at the state and regional levels with the exception of the Human Rights and the International Relations section, which only exist at the national level. This complex organizational structure—the fruit of 20 years of land struggle—has been consolidated, and a new generation of leaders who work within this structure has emerged.
This does not imply that the MST’s organizational structure is unchanging. On the contrary, as the debate on agrarian reform evolves, the MST constantly re-evaluates its strategy and adapts its organizational structure accordingly. The Human Rights section, for example, was created only after the national meeting in February 1998.[19] Prior to that, the MST lacked a specific structure to deal with this issue, and the main actor denouncing human rights violations was the Pastoral Land Commission through its annual reports. But by August 1997, one year after the killings in Eldorado dos Carajás, none of the 153 military police officers had been convicted, leading several MST leaders to the conclusion that their organization needed a section exclusively dedicated to pressuring national and international institutions to ensure respect for human rights and the rights of rural workers.
The priority placed on constructing strategic alliances since 1995 reveals even more clearly this constant re-evaluation on the part of the MST as a whole and is crucial in order to understand its continuing political influence. During the National Congress in July 1995 in Brasília, the MST entirely revised its position regarding the rest of Brazilian society. A comparison of the goals drawn up during the first National Meeting in 1984 in Cascável and those established during the National Congress in 1995 in Brasília illustrates this change of position. [See “MST Goals” at end of article.]
In 1984, only one point of the MST agenda referred to society as a whole, while six referred specifically to rural workers. By contrast, in 1995, six points referred to society as a whole but none referred specifically to rural workers. The same year, the MST changed its motto from “Land to the tiller” to “Agrarian reform: Everyone’s struggle.” This motto appears on all the products sold by the movement, ranging from compact discs to T-shirts to agricultural goods. This evolution was a necessary condition for the MST to build later alliances with other actors involved in land struggle or in the implementation of agrarian reform.
In addition, the MST once held a largely isolationist stance vis-à-vis other organizations. Even though it encouraged individual members to participate in political parties and unions, the movement as a whole was extremely reluctant to build any official alliance with such organizations. MST leader Gilmar Mauro explains this isolationism:
Experience throughout Latin America suggests that social movements and peasant movements that become linked to political parties run high risks. In the eventuality that the party breaks apart, it ends up dividing the social movement too. And when a political party enters in some kind of social pact, the movement becomes subordinated to the logic of the party and is no longer able to struggle. The dynamic of a social movement is very different from that of a union movement or of a political party; it is a dynamic of constant struggle, occupations, conquests and oppositions.[20]
But this fear became less prominent as the MST became more visible in the aftermath of the 1995 and 1996 massacres. The rising profile of the MST and the corresponding increase in its political weight made the organization less preoccupied with being subordinated to other organizations.
There was, moreover, a growing sense of support for the MST within civil society that forced the government to sit up and take notice. For example, a 1996 survey conducted by the Vox Populi Institute revealed that over 50% of the population supported the MST.[21] This support was also seen in more concrete ways. On February 17, 1997, three groups of landless workers left from the cities of Rondonópolis (in the western state of Mato Grosso), São Paulo (in the southern state of São Paulo), and Governador Valadares (in the eastern state of Minas Gerais) to march to Brasília to pay tribute to the victims of Eldorado dos Carajás. “When we left São Paulo for Brasília, we had food for two weeks,” said MST activist Mario Schons. “But after that it was the people we met on our way who fed us. When we arrived in Brasília we had so much food left that we were able to send it to the nearby encampments. So in this sense society supports us.”[22] Shortly after the march, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso announced that agrarian reform would cease to be the exclusive concern of the Special Ministry and would become “an absolute priority of the government as a whole.”[23]
With this growing political influence, the MST felt sufficiently strong to stop worrying about jeopardizing its autonomy. As a result, it began constructing alliances with unions, such as the Unified Workers’ Federation (CUT) and the CONTAG, and with political parties, primarily the Workers’ Party (PT). The movement also participated in a dialogue with government agencies.
Alliance building notwithstanding, the MST has continued to organize land occupations. It still uses the logic of action of a movement and the threat of mobilization as its main bargaining power. The comment of José Rainha, a national leader of the MST, on the official support that the MST was prepared to give to Luis Inácio Lula da Silva of the PT in the 1998 presidential elections is relevant in this respect:
We want to support Lula—a candidate of the left—to help us in the process of agrarian reform. But the agrarian reform implies a major social transformation that the government has to implement. We maintain that the agrarian reform we dream of will only happen with the struggle of rural workers.[24]
Lula, in turn, said that while he did not agree with all their decisions, he felt solidarity with the MST. “I often wish that the MST would discuss some of their actions with their allies before implementing them,” he said. “Then again, this is not always possible.” With respect to the alliance pressuring for agrarian reform, Lula noted: “What is important is to have a common objective to strive for, and we all agree on this objective, be it the Landless Workers’ Movement, the PT or the CUT. We need to carry out agrarian reform in Brazil as a means of fomenting social justice.”[25]
A good illustration of this unity is the March 1999 mobilization that took place after the federal government announced the creation of the Land Bank, a new World Bank-funded program designed to provide loans to landless workers to purchase land plots. The MST has sharply criticized the program, arguing that the loan conditions will render farmers unable to purchase land, and suggesting that the program’s overall intent is to avoid the implementation of agrarian reform. The MST expressed its concern to other organizations such as CONTAG, the Federation of Agricultural Workers, the CUT and the CPT. When the Minister of Landed Property Policy, Raúl Jungmann, launched the program, only three organizations out of 30 were present for the occasion. All the others boycotted the event.[26]
During his first campaign for the presidency in 1994, President Cardoso said that his government would tackle the problem of agrarian reform. This rhetorical promise aside, it is unclear if agrarian reform would have in fact become a political priority of the government had the killings at Corumbiara and Carajás not occurred. In any case, on April 18, 1996—one day after the Carajás killings—Minister of Agriculture Adrade Vieira resigned, and by the end of the month the Special Ministry for Agrarian Reform was created especially to address the problem of agrarian reform. The sense of urgency after the killings led to a number of other significant and unprecedented measures. For example, the rural land tax for large and unproductive properties was increased substantially, from a maximum of 4.5% for properties of more than 15,000 hectares (37,065 acres) to 20% for properties over 5,000 hectares (12,355 acres). Another measure approved was the Expedited Procedure Law, designed to accelerate expropriation and prevent the landowners’ lawyers from stalling the land redistribution process to obtain higher compensation.
According to government figures, between January 1 and December 20, 1999, 85,327 families benefited from the government’s agrarian reform policies, bringing the total number of families settled since the beginning of the Cardoso government in 1995 to 372,866. The MST disputes this number, estimating that over the past 15 years only 300,000 families have been settled. This debate about figures seems difficult to resolve, but it is important to note that after the media impact of the two massacres, the MST remains a significant player on the national political scene. It has not achieved its goal in terms of the number of families settled and hectares of land redistributed, but it has won another important battle: It has placed agrarian reform squarely on the political agenda. The network fighting for agrarian reform which the MST has helped create has succeeded in convincing the public that agrarian reform is not a short-term economic question but a long-term social and political problem.
Questions over how land reform will be implemented—how many hectares, in what regions, how quickly?—are legitimate, as are concerns over government initiatives, like the Land Bank, which seem to be designed to avoid expropriation. But it is important to understand that these questions can now be asked because the MST has succeeded in making agrarian reform an issue in Brazilian politics—something that was not at all a given just a few years ago.
MST Goals, 1984 and 1995
Land
1984: Land must only be in the hands of those who cultivate it.
1995: Land is a social good and must serve society as a whole.
Agrarian Reform
1984: To promote agrarian reform.
1995: To guarantee labor to all, with a fair distribution of land, income and resources.
Rural Workers
1984: To promote the organization of rural workers.
To stimulate rural workers’ involvement in political parties and unions.
To form a leadership of rural workers to determine the movement’s political line.
To coordinate the movement’s actions with urban workers and workers from Latin America.
1995: None
Society
1984: To struggle for a society without exploiters and exploited.
1995: To build a society without exploiters and where labor has supremacy over capital.
To seek social justice and the equality of economic, political, social and cultural rights.
To spread humanistic and socialist values in social relationships.
To oppose any kind of social discrimination and strive for greater women’s participation.
*Based on the MST National Meetings in 1984 and 1995.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne-Laure Cadji just completed an internship at the European Commission, where she worked in the Latin American Unit of the Foreign Relations Directorate General. She is currently writing her doctoral dissertation on the Landless Movement in Brazil at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford.
NOTES
1. See Amnesty International, “Corumbiara and Eldorado dos Carajás: Rural Violence, Police Brutality and Impunity,” Amnesty International Index (January 1998).
2. Conflitos no Campo (Goiâna: Comissão Pastoral da Terra, 1996).
3. Amnesty International, “Corumbiara and Eldorado dos Carajás,” p. 19.
4. Fábio L. S. Petrarolha, “Brazil: The Meek Want the Earth Now,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (November/December 1996), p. 20.
5. Francisco Leali, “Um mês de impunidade,” Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), May 20, 1996.
6. “Se quiserem cobrar do governo federal a responsabilidade, me dêem os instrumentos”; “FHC diz que não é ‘responsável’ por massacre,” Folha de São Paulo (São Paulo), April 21, 1996, p. 11.
7. Cândido Grzybowski, “Rural Workers’ Movement and Democratization in Brazil,” in Jonathan Fox, ed., The Challenge of Rural Democratization: Perspectives from Latin America and the Philippines (London: Cass, 1990), p. 34.
8. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 8.
9. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, p. 204.
10. Eliana Lucena, “Inquérito civil deverá ser prorrogado,” Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), April 24, 1996, p.4; Amnesty International, “Corumbiara and Eldorado dos Carajás,” p. 25.
11. Eliana Lucena, “Inquérito civil deverá ser prorrogado,” p. 2; Amnesty International, “Corumbiara and Eldorado dos Carajás,” p. 25.
12. Author’s interview, Neúri Rossetto, São Paulo, July 30, 1999.
13. The MST is not officially present in the states of Acre, Amazonas, Roraima and Amapá mainly because the terrain in this area of the Amazon region is too hostile to allow for permanent settlements. In addition, the MST originated in the southern states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul.
14. Author’s interview, Edson L. Vismona, Adjunct Secretary of Justice of the State of São Paulo, São Paulo, July 25, 1997.
15. Author’s interview, José Grégori, Brasília, August 6, 1999. The Human Rights Division of the Ministry of Justice was created in March 1997.
16. Author’s interview, Neúri Rossetto, São Paulo, July 23, 1997.
17. MST, Gênese e Desenvolvimento do MST, Cadernos de Formação, No. 30 (São Paulo: MST, 1998), p. 35.
18. Author’s interview, Neúri Rossetto, São Paulo, July 30, 1999.
19. Author’s interview, Judite Strozake, London, October 30, 1998.
20. Author’s interview, Gilmar Mauro, Pontal do Paranapanema, August 3, 1997.
21. “Apoio ao MST preocupa PFL,” Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), June 20, 1996.
22. Author’s interview, Mário Schons, Brasília, August 3, 1999.
23. Rodrigo França Taves, “Presidente determina prioridade para a reforma agrária envolvendo todo o Governo,” O Globo (Rio de Janeiro), February 17, 1997.
24. Author’s interview, José Rainha Jr. Teodoro Sampaio (Pontal do Paranapanema, state of São Paulo), August 1, 1997.
25. Author’s interview, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, São Paulo, July 28, 1999.
26. Author’s interview, Neúri Rossetto, São Paulo, July 30, 1999.
