AnarWiki/markdown/Landless_Workers'_Movement.md

The **Landless Workers' Movement** (Portuguese: *Movimento dos
Trabalhadores Sem Terra*, **MST**) is a left-wing social movement in
[Brazil](Brazil "wikilink") and is generally considered on of the
largest in the world.

## Land reform before the 1988 constitution

Land reform has a long history in Brazil, and the concept pre-dates the
MST. In the mid-20th century, Brazilian leftists reached a consensus
that democratization and widespread actual exercise of political rights
would require land reform.<sup>\[9\]</sup> Brazilian political elites
actively opposed land reform initiatives, which they felt threatened
their social and political status.<sup>\[10\]</sup> As such, political
leaders of the rural poor attempted to achieve land reform from below,
through grassroots action. MST broke new ground by tackling land reform
itself, "breaking... dependent relations with parties, governments, and
other institutions",<sup>\[11\]</sup> and framing the issue in purely
political terms rather than social, ethical or religious ones.

The first statute to regulate land ownership in Brazil after its
independence, Law 601 or *Lei de Terras* (Landed Property Act), took
effect September 18, 1850. A colonial administration, based on
Portuguese feudal law, had previously considered property ownership to
stem from royal grants (*sesmarias*) and pass through primogeniture
(*morgadio*). In the independent Brazilian state, the default means of
acquiring land was through purchase, from either the state or a previous
private owner. This law strongly limited squatter's rights and favoured
the historic concentration of land ownership which became a hallmark of
modern Brazilian social history.<sup>\[12\]</sup> The *Lei de Terras*
left in place the colonial practice of favouring of large landholdings
created by mammoth land grants to well-placed people, which were usually
worked by slaves.<sup>\[13\]</sup>

In capitalist terms, continuing the policy favoured economies of scale
given the limited number of land owners, but at the same time made it
difficult for small planters and peasants to obtain the land needed to
practice subsistence agriculture and small-scale
farming.<sup>\[14\]</sup>

The consolidation of land ownership into just a few hands had ties to
the advent of capitalism in Brazil, and opposition and insurrection in
the 19th and early 20th century (for example the Canudos War in the
1890s and the Contestado War in the 1910s) idealized older forms of
property<sup>\[*which?*\]</sup> and revitalized
ideologies<sup>\[15\]</sup> centered on a fabled millenarian return to
an earlier, pre-bourgeois social order. Advocated by groups led by rogue
messianic religious leaders outside the established Catholic hierarchy,
these ideologies seemed heretical and revolutionary.<sup>\[16\]</sup>
Some leftist historians, following the tracks of the groundbreaking 1963
work by journalist Rui Facó \[fr\] (*Cangaceiros e Fanáticos*), tend to
conflate early 20th-century banditry in northeastern Brazil (*cangaço*)
with messianism as a kind of social banditry, a protest against such
social inequalities as the uneven distribution of land
assets.<sup>\[17\]\[18\]</sup> This theory developed independently in
English-speaking academia around Eric Hobsbawn's 1959 work *Primitive
Rebels*. It was criticized for its unspecific definition of "social
movement", but also praised for melding political and religious
movements, previously separately examined.<sup>\[19\]</sup> This blend
was later the basis for the MST's emergence.

Both messianism and ''cangaço ''disappeared in the late 1930s, but in
the 1940s and '50s, additional peasant resistance broke out to evictions
and land grabbing by powerful ranchers:

  - Teófilo Otoni, Minas Gerais, in 1948
  - Porecatu, Paraná, in 1951
  - Southwest Paraná, in 1957
  - Trombas and Goiás, 1952–1958<sup>\[20\]</sup>

These local affairs, however, were repressed or settled locally and did
not give rise to an ideology. Policy makers and scholars across the
political spectrum believed that it was, objectively, an economic
necessity to permit the end of Brazilian rural society through
mechanized agrobusiness and forcible urbanization. The left in
particular felt that the technologically backward, feudal *latifundia*
impeded both economic modernization and
democratization.<sup>\[21\]</sup>

During the 1960s various groups attempted land reform through the legal
system, beginning with the peasant leagues (*Ligas Camponesas*) in
northeastern Brazil,<sup>\[22\]</sup> which opposed eviction of tenant
farmers land and the transformation of plantations into cattle
ranches.<sup>\[23\]</sup> These groups questioned the existing
distribution of land ownership through a rational appeal to the social
function of property.<sup>\[*clarification needed*\]</sup>

Despite the efforts of these groups, land ownership continued to
concentrate, and both at the time of MST's founding and in the present
day Brazil has had a highly dynamic and robust agricultural business
sector that came, say some,<sup>\[*who?*\]</sup> at the price of
extensive dislocation of the rural poor.<sup>\[24\]</sup> MST questioned
the scope of the benefits from the alleged efficiency of the change,
given that since 1850 Brazilian land development had been concerned with
the interests of a single class – the rural
bourgeoisie.<sup>\[25\]</sup> While the MST frames its policies in
socio-economic terms, it still points to Canudos and its alleged
millenarism<sup>\[26\]</sup> to legitimize its
existence<sup>\[27\]</sup> and to develop a powerful mystique of its
own.<sup>\[28\]</sup>

A great deal of the early organizing in the MST came from Catholic
communities.<sup>\[29\]</sup> Much of MST ideology and practice come
from a social doctrine of the Catholic Church: that private property
should serve a social function.<sup>\[30\]</sup> This principle
developed during the 19th century<sup>\[31\]</sup> and became Catholic
doctrine with Pope Leo XIII's *Rerum novarum*
encyclical,<sup>\[32\]</sup> promulgated on the eve of the 1964 military
coup. This doctrine was evoked by President João Goulart at a rally in
Rio de Janeiro, at which he offered a blueprint for political and social
reforms and proposed expropriation of estates larger than 600 hectares
in areas near federal facilities such as roads, railroads, reservoirs
and sanitation works; these ideas triggered a strong conservative
backlash and led to Goulart's loss of power.<sup>\[33\]</sup>
Nevertheless, the Brazilian Catholic hierarchy formally acknowledged the
principle in 1980.<sup>\[34\]\[35\]</sup>

In Brazilian constitutional history, land reform – understood in terms
of public management of natural resources<sup>\[36\]</sup> – was first
explicitly mentioned as a guiding principle of government in the 1967
constitution,<sup>\[37\]</sup> which sought to institutionalize an
authoritarian consensus after the 1964 coup. The military dictatorship
intended to use land reform policy to develop a buffer of conservative
small farmers between *latifundia* owners and the rural
proletariat.<sup>\[38\]</sup> In 1969, at the most repressive point of
the dictatorship, the 1967 constitution was amended by a decree (*ato
institucional*) by a junta that held interim power during the final
illness of president Arthur da Costa e Silva, authorizing government
compensation for property expropriated for land reform. This
compensation would be made in government bonds rather than cash,
previously the only legal practice (Art. 157, §1, as amended by
Institutional Act No. 9, 1969).<sup>\[39\]</sup>

## Land reform and the 1988 constitution

The constitution now in effect, passed in 1988, requires that "property
shall serve its social function"<sup>\[40\]</sup> and that the
government should "expropriate for the purpose of agrarian reform, rural
property that is not performing its social function."<sup>\[41\]</sup>

Under Article 186 of the constitution, a 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.
  - Development uses which favor the well-being of owners and workers.

Since the criteria are vague and not objectively defined, the social
interest principle was seen as a mixed blessing,<sup>\[*who?*\]</sup>
but accepted in general. Landowners have lobbied against the principle
since 1985 through the landowners' organization, União Democrática
Ruralista (Democratic Union of Rural People, or UDR), whose rise and
organization parallels that of the MST. Although it avowedly dissolved
itself in the early 1990s, some believe it persists in informal regional
ties between landowners.<sup>\[42\]</sup> UDR lobbying over the
constitutional text is believed<sup>\[*who?*\]</sup> to have watered
down concrete enforcement of the "social interest"
principle.<sup>\[43\]</sup>

One Brazilian law handbook argues that land reform, as understood in the
1988 constitution, is a concept made up of various "compromises" on
which constitutional law has consistently evaded taking a clear stance,
and so one could argue either for or against the MST without leaving the
framework of the Constitution.<sup>\[44\]</sup> The lack of clear
government commitment to land reform precludes the MST engaging in
public-interest litigation,<sup>\[45\]</sup> so concrete proceedings for
land reform are left to the initiative of the groups concerned, through
onerous and time-consuming legal proceedings. Given "the highly
problematic and ideologically driven nature of the Brazilian justice
system".<sup>\[46\]</sup> all parties have an incentive to resort to
more informal methods: "while the large landowners try to evacuate
squatters from their land, squatters might use violence to force
institutional intervention favoring them with the land expropriation
afterwards \[...\] violence is mandatory for both sides to achieve their
goals".<sup>\[47\]</sup> These tactics raise controversy about the
legality of the MST's actions, since it tries to ensure social justice
unilaterally.<sup>\[48\]</sup>

The MST identifies rural land it believes to be unproductive and that
does not meet its social function, then occupies the
land,<sup>\[49\]</sup> only afterwards moving to ascertain the legality
of the occupation. The MST is represented in these activities by public
interest legal counsel, including their own lawyers, sons and daughters
of MST families, and organizations such as *Terra de Direitos*, a human
rights organization co-founded by Darci Frigo, the 2001 Robert F.
Kennedy Memorial Human Rights Award Laureate.<sup>\[50\]</sup> The
courts might eventually issue a warrant for eviction, requiring the
occupier families to leave, or it might deny the landowner's petition
and allow the families to stay provisionally and engage in subsistence
farming until the federal agency responsible for agrarian reform,
Brazil's National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform
(INCRA), determines whether occupied property had indeed been
unproductive. The MST's legal activity bases itself on the idea that
property rights are in a continuous process of social construction, so
litigation and seeking to strike sympathy among the judiciary is
essential to MST's legitimacy.<sup>\[51\]</sup>

Traditionally, Brazilian courts side with landowners and file charges
against MST members some call "frivolous and bizarre".<sup>\[52\]</sup>
For instance, in a 2004 land occupation in Pernambuco, a judge issued
arrest warrants for MST members and described them as highly dangerous
criminals.<sup>\[53\]</sup> Nevertheless, many individual judges have
shown themselves sympathetic.<sup>\[54\]</sup> Brazilian higher courts
have usually regarded the MST with reserve: in February 2009, for
instance, the then-president of the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF),
Gilmar Mendes, declared the MST engaged in "illicit" activities and
opposed granting it public monies, and supported an "adequate" judicial
response towards land occupation.<sup>\[55\]</sup> The MST leadership
has in turn on various occasions charged that the STF as a whole is
consistently hostile to the movement. In late 2013, it described the
court as "lackeying to the ruling class" and "working for years against
the working class and social movements".<sup>\[56\]</sup> This fraught
relationship came to a head on February 12, 2014, when a court session
was suspended after an attempted invasion of the court building in
Brasilia by MST activists, who were met by police firing rubber bullets
and tear gas.<sup>\[57\]</sup>

## History

### Foundation

Monument by Oscar Niemeyer 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.<sup>\[58\]</sup> In
the mid-1980s, out of 370 million hectares of farm land total, 285
million hectares (77%) were held by latifundia.<sup>\[59\]</sup> The
re-democratization process in the 1980s, however, allowed grassroots
movements to pursue their own interests<sup>\[60\]</sup> 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 Passo Real \[pt\] to make way for construction of a
hydroelectric dam.<sup>\[61\]</sup> This first group was later joined by
an additional 300 (or, according to other sources, over 1,000)
households evicted by FUNAI<sup>\[*who?*\]</sup> from the Kaingang
Indian reservation in Nonoai, where they had been renting plots since
1968.<sup>\[62\]\[*better source needed*\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[63\]</sup> 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 Sebastião Curió \[pt\],
already notorious for his past counter-insurgency efforts against the
Araguaia guerrillas.

Curió enforced the blockade ruthlessly,<sup>\[64\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[65\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[66\]</sup> The MST also developed what became
its chief *modus operandi*: local organizing around the concrete
struggles of a specific demographic group.<sup>\[67\]</sup>

The MST was officially founded in January 1984, during a National
Encounter of landless workers in Cascavel, Paraná,<sup>\[68\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[69\]</sup>

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 tradeunionism in the strictest
sense, acting until today as a rural branch of the Central Única dos
Trabalhadores (CUT).<sup>\[70\]</sup> MST eventually all but monopolized
political attention as a spokesman for rural workers.<sup>\[71\]</sup>

From the 1980s on, the MST hasn't had 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 political leverage enough to turn occupation into
formal expropriation 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.<sup>\[72\]</sup>

### 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<sup>\[73\]</sup> 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, 19 MST members
were gunned down and another 69 wounded by police as they blocked a
state road in Pará.<sup>\[74\]</sup> In 1997 alone, similar
confrontations with police and landowners' security details accounted
for two dozen internationally acknowledged deaths.<sup>\[75\]</sup>

In 2002, the MST occupied the family farm of then-president Fernando
Henrique Cardoso <sup>\[76\]</sup> in Minas Gerais, a move publicly
condemned by Lula, then leader of the leftist
opposition.<sup>\[77\]</sup> and other prominent members of the
PT.<sup>\[78\]\[79\]</sup> The farm was damaged and looted in the
occupation, and a combine harvester, a tractor and several pieces of
furniture were destroyed.<sup>\[80\]</sup> MST members also drank all
the alcohol at the farm. Later, 16 MST leaders were charged with theft,
vandalism, trespassing, kidnapping and resisting
arrest.<sup>\[81\]</sup>

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.<sup>\[82\]</sup>

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 March 8, 2005, the MST invaded a
nursery and a research center in Barra do Ribeiro, 56 km 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 agrobusiness, "the project of organization of agriculture by
transnational capital allied to capitalist farming"—a model he deems
socially backwards and environmentally harmful.<sup>\[83\]</sup> In the
words of an anonymous activist: "our struggle is not only to win the
land ... we are building a new way of life".<sup>\[84\]</sup> 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,<sup>\[85\]</sup> especially in the
area of intellectual property.<sup>\[86\]</sup> This principle led to
the July 2000 attack on a ship in Recife loaded with GM maize from
Argentina.<sup>\[87\]</sup> Since 2000, much of the movement's activism
consisted in symbolic acts against multinational corporations as "a
symbol of the intervention politics of the big monopolies operating in
Brazil".<sup>\[88\]</sup>

A possible reason contributing to the change in strategy might have been
the perceived shift in government stance 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.<sup>\[89\]</sup> It would
better to create of skilled jobs, which would cause the land reform
issue to recede into the background.<sup>\[90\]</sup> 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".<sup>\[91\]</sup>

Cardoso offered lip service to agrarian reform in general, but also
described the movement as "a threat to democracy".<sup>\[92\]</sup> He
compared the MST's demands for subsidized credit, which led to the 1998
occupation of various banks in Paraná, to bank robbery.<sup>\[93\]</sup>
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 saying "the image of mobs taking over
privately-owned farms would chase away investment, both local and
foreign".<sup>\[94\]</sup> Although Cardoso himself never branded the
MST as terrorist, 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.<sup>\[95\]</sup> In July
1997, Cardoso' 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.<sup>\[96\]</sup>

In terms of concrete measures, Cardoso's government's approach to land
reform was divided: at the same time it 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.<sup>\[97\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[98\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[99\]</sup>

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.<sup>\[100\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[101\]</sup>
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, or SDS.<sup>\[102\]</sup>

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".<sup>\[103\]</sup>
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".<sup>\[104\]</sup> - something that in his view
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.<sup>\[105\]</sup> 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, congregating 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 division of
labour.<sup>\[106\]</sup>

MST somewhat filled the void left by the decline of the organized labor
movement in the wake of Cardoso's neoliberal policies.<sup>\[107\]</sup>
Therefore, the movement took steps to ally with urban struggles,
specially those connected to housing.<sup>\[108\]</sup> 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" resides.<sup>\[109\]</sup>

### 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<sup>\[*clarification needed*\]</sup>, in a second wave of
occupations starting in 2003.<sup>\[110\]</sup> However, the Lula
government's increasingly conservative positions, including its low
profile on land reform,<sup>\[111\]\[112\]</sup> actually somewhat less
than achieved by Cardoso in his first term<sup>\[113\]</sup>) 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 Monsanto Company in the
state of Goiás.<sup>\[114\]</sup> On March 7, 2008, a similar action by
women activists at another Monsanto facility at 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".<sup>\[115\]</sup> The dominance of transnationals over
Brazilian seed production was summed by the fact that the Brazilian
hybrid seed industry in the early 2000s already was 82%
Monsanto-owned,<sup>\[116\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[117\]\[118\]</sup> Stedile later
called Monsantp one of the ten transnational companies that controlled
virtually all international agrarian production and commodity
trading.<sup>\[119\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[120\]</sup>

After an exchange of barbs between Lula and Stedile over what Lula saw
as an unnecessary radicalization of the movement's
demands,<sup>\[121\]</sup> 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, Brasilia. 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 allocate 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.<sup>\[122\]</sup> The movement claimed 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.<sup>\[123\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[124\]</sup>

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 MSTleaders met with President Lula da Silva on May 18,
2005- a meeting that had been resisted by Lula since his taking of
office.<sup>\[125\]</sup> 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 that year, João Pedro Stedile declared
that, in terms of land reform, Lula's government was
"finished".<sup>\[126\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[127\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[128\]</sup> Attempts to officially
define the MST as a "terrorist organization" were also opposed by
Workers' Party congresspersons.<sup>\[129\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[130\]</sup>

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.<sup>\[131\]</sup>

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.<sup>\[132\]</sup>
In May 2005, *Veja* accused the MST of helping the Primeiro Comando da
Capital (PCC), the most powerful prison-gang criminal organization in
the 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
<sup>\[133\]</sup> about the best ways to stage what became the largest
protest by prisoners' relatives in Brazilian history. On April 18, 2005
some 3,000 relatives protested prevailing conditions in São Paulo
correctional facilities.<sup>\[134\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[135\]</sup> In the wake of 9-11, Brazilian media tended
to describe the MST as "terrorist", lumping it together loosely with
various historical and mediatic happenings<sup>\[136\]</sup> in keeping
with an international post-9-11 trend to relegate any political movement
against existing globalization to beyond the pale and outside the
boundaries of permissible political discourse.<sup>\[137\]</sup>

The MST assumes its activities are continuously surveilled by military
intelligence.<sup>\[138\]</sup> Various intelligence organs, Brazilian
and foreign, assume a relationship between the MST and various terrorist
groups.<sup>\[139\]</sup> The MST is regarded as a source of "civil
unrest".<sup>\[140\]</sup>

A parliamentary inquiry commission where landowner-friendly congressmen
held a majority classified the MST's activities as terrorism in late
2005, and the MST itself as a criminal organization. However, its report
met with 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, who embezzle land
illegally".<sup>\[141\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[142\]\[143\]</sup>

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.<sup>\[144\]</sup> Eucalyptus, a non-native plant, has been
blamed for environmental degradation in northeastern
Brazil,<sup>\[145\]</sup> as well as reducing the availability of land
for small agricultural production, called by some "cornering" producers
(*encurralados pelo eucalipto*).<sup>\[146\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[147\]</sup>

In 2008 a group of public attorneys from Rio Grande do Sul working with
the state's military police issued a report charging the MST with
collusion with international terrorist groups. The report is used in
state courts, according to Amnesty International, to justify eviction
orders carried out by the police with what "excessive use of
force".<sup>\[148\]</sup> The group of attorneys made public a
previously classified report bu the Council of Public Attorneys of Rio
Grande do Sul asking 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.<sup>\[149\]</sup> 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".<sup>\[150\]</sup>

Between September 27 and October 7, 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.<sup>\[151\]</sup>
Ireply, the MST declared the farm to be government property illegally
embezzled by Cutrale, and that the occupation was intended to protest
this, while the destruction was done by provocateurs.<sup>\[152\]</sup>
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.<sup>\[153\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[154\]</sup>

During the same period, the MST also repeatedly blocked highways
<sup>\[155\]\[156\]\[157\]\[158\]</sup> and railroads,<sup>\[159\]</sup>
to create call public attention to landless workers'
plight.<sup>\[160\]</sup>

### 2010 - present

The MST wholeheartedly declared support for Dilma Rousseff's candidacy,
but 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.<sup>\[161\]</sup>
As Lula's chief of staff she supported economic growth over ecological
and land reform concerns.<sup>\[162\]</sup> In a radio interview during
the campaign she repeated the old conservative hope 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".<sup>\[163\]</sup> Thus one author described
the MST's endorsement of Rousseff as a choice of the "lesser
evil".<sup>\[164\]</sup>

State agencies and private individuals continued to violently oppose the
movement's activities. On 16 February 2012, 80 families were evicted
from an occupation in Alagoas of a farm rented to a sugar mill awash in
unpaid debts.<sup>\[165\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[166\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[167\]</sup> 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.\[44\]

On April 16, 2012, a group of MST activists occupied the headquarters in
Brasília of the Ministry of Agrarian Development, 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.<sup>\[168\]</sup> Minister Pepe Vargas \[pt\] declared ongoing
talks between the government and the MST suspended for the duration of
the occupation.<sup>\[169\]</sup>

Land activists were dissatisfied 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.<sup>\[170\]</sup> 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.<sup>\[171\]</sup>

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 it attempted only 110
occupations.<sup>\[172\]</sup> That year<sup>\[*when?*\]</sup> saw
another yearly low, only 159 families resettled in land reform. 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 not only was
not advancing land reform, but went backward in some
cases.<sup>\[173\]</sup> The only recent advances in land reform
policies had come in such programs as the National Program for School
Meals (PNAE) and Food Catering Plan (PAA), which buy food from land
reform farmers for use at public schools and other government
facilities. However, such programs were "entirely disproportionate to
what is being offered \[in terms of public money, subsidized credits,
etc.\] to agribusiness", he said, and 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".<sup>\[174\]</sup>

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.<sup>\[175\]</sup>

In November 2014, amid the radicalization surrounding Roussef'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", "an arraa clearly more conservative
stance on land reform, and therefore, less maneuvering room for the
MST.<sup>\[176\]</sup> The movement described Caiado's reaction as
evidence that "conservative sectors are hostile to any form of
grassroots participation \[in the political
process\]".<sup>\[177\]</sup>

In an even clearer sign of limited room, Rousseff chose for her
second-term cabinet the notorious female landowner Kátia
Abreu.<sup>\[178\]\[179\]</sup> However, some 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 wider focus on political and social
emancipation.<sup>\[180\]</sup> Such a tendency has been expressed in
the integration, since the 1990s, of MST with various other grassroots
organization in a network sponsored by progressive Catholics, the CMP
(*Central de Movimentos Populares*, or Union of Popular
Movements)<sup>\[181\]</sup> through which the MST developed its
collaboration with its urban "sister" organization, the
MTST.<sup>\[182\]</sup>

## Land ownership

Consolidation of land ownership continued unabated. In 2006, according
to the 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. In other words, concentration of land ownership into just a few
hands actually increased.<sup>\[183\]</sup> Current Brazilian economic
policy<sup>\[*when?*\]</sup> especially in foreign exchange, relies on
trade surpluses generated by the agricultural exports, so "the
correlation of forces moves against agrarian reform".<sup>\[184\]</sup>
The resumption of sustained general economic growth in the Lula years
might have greatly diminished social demand for land reform, especially
among the informally and/or under-employed urban workers who form most
of the movements' later membership.<sup>\[185\]\[186\]</sup> In a recent
interview<sup>\[*when?*\]</sup> a member of the MST national caucus,
Joaquim Pinheiro, declared that the recent increase in welfare spending
and employment levels had had a "sobering" influence on Brazilian
agrarian activism, but he declared himself in favor or government
spending on social programs, adding that the MST feared however that
people would become "hostages" to such programs.<sup>\[187\]</sup> But
as of 2006, according to the MST, 150,000 families lived in its
encampments, compared to 12,805 families in 1990.<sup>\[188\]</sup>

## 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 organization, reflecting liberation theology
and Freirean pedagogy, also avoids distinct leadership that can be
bought off or assassinated.<sup>\[189\]</sup> The basic organizational
unit, 10 to 15 families living in an MST encampment
settlement,<sup>\[190\]\[191\]</sup> is known as a *nucleo de base*. A
*nucleo de base* addresses the issues faced by member families, and
members elect two representatives, one woman and one man, to represent
them at settlement/encampment meetings. These representatives attend
regional meetings, and elect regional representatives who then elect the
members of the state coordinating body of the MST, a total of 400
members of state bodies—around 20 per state—and 60 members of the
national coordinating body, around 2 per state. Every MST family
participates in a *nucleo de base*, roughly 475,000 families, or 1.5
million people. João Pedro Stédile, economist and author of 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 secrecy minimizes the risk of arrest<sup>\[192\]</sup> and
also for preserving a grassroots, decentralized organizational model.
This is regarded as an important strategy by the MST, in that it allows
the movement 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".<sup>\[193\]</sup> 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*.

The structure and goals of the MST has led some authors to consider it a
large libertarian socialist, or anarchist
organisation.<sup>\[194\]</sup>

## Ideology

The MST is an ideologically eclectic rural movement of hundreds of
thousands of landless peasants (and some who live in small cities)
striving for land reform in Brazil. The MST has been inspired since its
inception by liberation theology, Marxism, the Cuban Revolution, and
other leftist ideologies. The flexible mix of discourse that includes
"marxist concepts, popular religion, communal practices, citizenship
principles and radical democracy", has increased the movement's popular
appeal.<sup>\[195\]</sup>

The landless say they have found institutional support in the Catholic
Church's teachings of social justice and equality, as embodied in the
activities of Catholic Base Committees (*Comissões Eclesiais de Base*,
or CEBs) which generally advocate liberation theology and
anti-hierarchical social relations. This theology, a radicalized
re-reading of the existing social doctrine of the Church, became the
basis of the MST's ideology and organizational
structure.<sup>\[189\]</sup> The loss of influence of progressives in
the later Catholic Church<sup>\[*when?*\]</sup>, however, has reduced
the closeness of the relationship between the MST and the Church as
such.<sup>\[196\]</sup>

MST's anti-hierarchical stance stems from the influence of Paulo Freire.
After working with poor communities in the rural Brazilian state of
Pernambuco, Freire observed that aspects of traditional classrooms, such
as teachers with more power than students, hindered the potential for
success of adults in adult literacy programs. He determined that the
students' individual abilities to learn and absorb information were
severely impeded by their passive role in the classroom. His teachings
encouraged activists to break their passive dependence on oppressive
social conditions and become engaged in active modes of behaving and
living. 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 from developing.<sup>\[189\]</sup>

The MST has widened the scope of their movement. They have invaded the
headquarters of public and multinational institutions, and begun to
resist the appearance of fields of genetically modified crops, carrying
out marches, hunger strikes and other political actions. The MST
cooperates with a number of rural worker movements and urban movements
in other areas of Brazil<sup>\[*where?*\]</sup>. The MST also remains in
touch with broader international organizations and movements that
support and embrace the same cause.<sup>\[197\]</sup> The MST includes
not only landless workers *stricto sensu*, or rural workers recently
evicted from the land, but also the urban jobless and homeless people
who want to make a living by working on the land; thus its affinity with
housing reform and other urban movements.<sup>\[198\]</sup> The
squatters' movement MTST (*Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem teto* -
Homeless Workers' Movement) is commonly seem as an offshoot of the
MST.<sup>\[199\]</sup>

### Ideological foundations of MST's later activism

This supposed opposition to capitalist modernity on the part of the
movement<sup>\[200\]</sup> has led authors to ascertain that the MST
activities express, in a way, the *decline* of a traditional peasantry,
and its desire of *restoring* traditional communal
rights.<sup>\[201\]</sup> - which would the difference between the MST
and a movement for the *preservation* of such communal rights as the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation.<sup>\[202\]</sup>

Others, however, 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<sup>\[203\]</sup> and has
as its social basis a rural working class striving at granting a toehold
in the field of capitalist production. As remarked by non-specialist
foreign onlookers, the MST's tagging of the landless as "rural workers"
- i.e. proletarians in the Marxist sense - appears sometimes more as a
purely ideological branding than anything else.<sup>\[204\]</sup>

According even to a Leftist scholar like James Petras, 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.<sup>\[205\]</sup> 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".<sup>\[206\]</sup> 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 mechanization, processing enterprises, livestock breeding, as
well as granting access to additional credit sources.<sup>\[207\]</sup>
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"<sup>\[208\]</sup> by means of a kind of
"guerrilla capitalism", aimed at ensuring that smaller producers
associations carve a share of the market for agrarian produce as against
the competition of mammoth agribusiness trusts.<sup>\[209\]</sup>

In the view of Marxist authors as Petras and Veltmeyer, such a stance
would reflect the incapacity of a heterogeneous coalition of rural
people to engage in a broad anti-systemic coalition which would include
the urban working classes.<sup>\[210\]</sup> Shunning this Marxist
paradigm, other authors see in the rhetoric of the MST the reflection of
an ideological struggle, not for taking power, but for *recognizance*,
for "reconstituting the diversity of rural Brazil".<sup>\[211\]</sup>
This struggle for recognizance - despite its being couched in fiery
radical rhetoric - is seen by some as "indeed relevant for the
democratization of 'rural society', but \[it does\] not entail political
motivations destined to promote ruptures".<sup>\[212\]</sup> In even
more blunt terms, a recent academic paper asserts that the ideology of
the MST, connected as it is in practice with the landlesss' concrete
needs for making out a living in the countryside, is above all an
*edible* ideology.<sup>\[213\]</sup> A recent German handbook describes
the MST as a mere *pressure group*, unable to exert actual political
power.<sup>\[214\]</sup> Other authors, however, maintain that the
interest of the MST in maximize its members' everyday participation in
the running of their own affairs is enough to describe the movement as
"socialist" in a broad sense.<sup>\[215\]</sup>

## Education

According to the MST, it taught over 50,000 landless workers to read and
write between 2002 and 2005. It also runs the Popular University of
Social Movements (PUSM)<sup>\[216\]</sup> at a campus in Guararema, São
Paulo. Also called Florestan Fernandes School (FFS), after Marxist
scholar Florestan Fernandes, the school offers secondary school classes
in a variety of fields; its first graduating class (2005) of 53 students
received degrees in Specialized Rural Education and Development. With
the University of Brasília, the government of Venezuela and Via
Campesina, as well as agreements with federal, state and community
colleges, it offers classes in pedagogy, history, and agronomy, and
technical subjects at different skill levels.<sup>\[217\]</sup> The
building was constructed with by brigades of volunteers using soil
cement bricks made onsite at the school.<sup>\[218\]</sup> The late
Oscar Niemeyer designed an auditorium and further sustainable, low
environmental impact expansion of the school complex is
pending.<sup>\[219\]\[*when?*\]</sup>

The MST formed its education sector in Rio Grande do Sul in 1986, a year
after its first national convention.<sup>\[220\]</sup> By 2001, about
150,000 children attended 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 classes
for 25,000 young people and adults. It trains primary-school teachers in
most states of Brazil, and partners with international agencies such as
UNESCO, UNICEF and the Catholic Church. Seven institutions of higher
education in different regions provide degree courses in education for
MST teachers.<sup>\[221\]</sup> Some call MST communal schools markedly
better than their conventional counterparts in rural communities, in
both quantitative and qualitative terms.<sup>\[222\]</sup>

## Media coverage

The role of the MST as a grassroots organization running charter schools
activity has attracted considerable attention from the Brazilian press,
much of it accusatory. *Veja*, Brazil's largest magazine, known for
unrestrained hostility <sup>\[223\]</sup> to social movements in
general<sup>\[224\]</sup> published a profile<sup>\[225\]</sup> of two
MST schools in Rio Grande do Sul and said the MST was "indoctrinating"
children between 7 and 14.<sup>\[226\]</sup> Children were also shown
what she called propaganda films, which taught that genetically modified
(GMO) products contain "poison", and were advised not to eat margarine
that might contain GMO soybean. The Brazilian authorities allegedly had
no control over MST schools, and according to the profile they did not
follow the mandatory national curriculum set out by the Ministry of
Education, which calls for "pluralism of ideas" and "tolerance".
"Preaching" "Marxism" in MST schools was analogous to preaching radical
Islam tenets in madrassas, the article said.<sup>\[227\]</sup>

This was just one episode in a long history of mutual very bitter
animosity between *Veja* and the MST. In 1993, the magazine described
the MST as "a peasant organization of Leninist character" and charged
its leaders and activists with pretending to be
homeless.<sup>\[228\]</sup> In February 2009 the magazine opposed public
support for the "criminal" activities of the movement<sup>\[229\]</sup>
and the MST charged the magazine a year later with "vandalizing" both
journalism and the truth itself.<sup>\[230\]</sup> A recent mention of
the MST in *Veja* called it "a criminal mob".<sup>\[231\]</sup> In early
2014, after MST to tried to invade the STF building, a *Veja* columnist
described said it was "playing leader to a non-existing
cause".<sup>\[232\]</sup> This journalistic mud-slinging has justified
at least two academic monographs wholly dedicated to it
alone.<sup>\[233\]\[234\]</sup>

Overall the relationship of the mainstream media with the MST has been
ambiguous: in the 1990s they tended to support land reform as a goal in
general, and presented MST in a sympathetic light. For example, between
1996 and 1997 TV Globo broadcast a *telenovela* *O Rei do Gado* (The
Cattle Baron), in which a beautiful female *sem terra* played by actress
Patricia Pillar falls in love with a male landowner.<sup>\[235\]</sup>
In the same *telenovela*, a wake for the fictitious Senator Caxias,
killed while defending an MST occupation, offered the opportunity for
two real-life senators from the PT, Eduardo Suplicy and Benedita da
Silva, to make cameo appearances as themselves praising their fictive
colleague's agenda.<sup>\[236\]</sup>

The media however tend to disavow what they see as violent
methods,<sup>\[237\]</sup> especially as the movement gathered
strength.<sup>\[238\]</sup> It does not outright disavow the movement's
struggle for land reform, but Brazilian media moralize: "to deplore the
invasion of productive land, the MST's irrationality and lack of
responsibility, the ill-using of distributed land parcels and to argue
for the existence of alternate peaceful solutions".<sup>\[239\]</sup>

## Sustainable agriculture

The increased importance of the technicians and experts within the MST
has led some sections of the movement to strive to develop and diffuse
technology suitable for a model of sustainable agriculture on the land
the families farm.<sup>\[240\]</sup> Such self-developed technology is
seen as a way to turn small producers from consumers into producers of
technologies,<sup>\[241\]</sup> - and therefore as a hedge against small
producers' dependence on chemical inputs and single-crop price
fluctuations<sup>\[242\]</sup> and a way to preserving natural
resources.<sup>\[243\]</sup> These efforts are gaining in importance as
more movement families gain access to the land. For example, the Chico
Mendes Center for Agroecology, founded May 15, 2004 in Ponta Grossa,
Paraná, Brazil on land formerly used by the Monsanto Company to grow
genetically modified crops, intends to produce organic, native seed to
distribute through MST. Various other experiments in reforestation,
taming of native species<sup>\[*clarification needed*\]</sup> and
medicinal uses of plans have been carried out in MST
settlements.<sup>\[244\]</sup>

In 2005, the MST partnered with the federal government of Venezuela, and
the state government of Paraná, the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR),
and the International Via Campesina, 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, located in an MST agrarian reform project known as the
Contestado settlement, signed a protocol of intentions in
January<sup>\[*when?*\]</sup> during the fifth World Social
Forum.<sup>\[245\]</sup>