Movement of Landless Farm Workers

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Rally at the 5th MST Congress in Brasília, June 2007
Children of the landless sing The Internationale on the 20th anniversary of the founding of the MST, Itapeva-São Paulo, 2004

The Landless Workers' Movement ( Portuguese Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra ), often short movement of the landless ( Movimento dos Sem Terra ), abbreviated MST is a mass movement in Brazil , which for a radical land reform starts and beyond social and makes political demands. The movement received the Right Livelihood Award in 1991 .

Prehistory, situation of the landless

The land question ( questão agrária ) is a topic with a long history in Brazil. Previous landless movements in history were suppressed by the Brazilian military or were dissolved again by the emigration of landless people to the Amazonia . The forerunners of the MST emerged in the 1970s in the south of Brazil, where, as a result of modernization measures, on the one hand many large agro-industrial farms for export products emerged, on the other hand many agricultural workers lost their jobs due to the mechanization of agriculture . They saw themselves as the losers of modernization. The landless decided to organize and defend themselves due to the extremely unequal distribution of land in Brazil, where around 10 percent of the population own around 80 percent of the land.

The following groups are considered landless for the MST:

  • posseiros (works on land without title; after 30 years the land would legally become property, but this is practically impracticable as the farm workers are exposed to constant threats.)
  • assalariados (wage workers), boia-frias and diaristas ( day laborers )
  • parceiros (tenant, the lease amount is calculated as a percentage of the income)
  • meeiros (tenants, whose fee to the owner is 50%)
  • arrendatarios (tenants whose lease amount is agreed in advance)
  • pequenos agricultores (small farmers with a maximum of 5 hectares of land)

Movimento dos Sem Terra

Since the other organizations with similar goals were judged to be too little revolutionary and too conformist with the government, the MST received a strong support. As a result, it rose to become a socially relevant social movement in Brazil, which claimed (and still represents) to want to change society as a whole. In doing so, it orients itself on collective forms of action and organization (for example cooperatives ), wants to place the importance of work above that of capital and fights for social justice and against discrimination against women. Their actions followed the principle of non-violence , also motivated by the Christian (mostly Catholic) faith. The ideals of the landless movement are close to those of liberation theology , but for some years they have been accused of having distanced themselves from the principle of non-violence.

The MST was formally founded in 1984 in the city of Cascavel (State of Paraná ). This was made possible by the democratization after the military dictatorship that lasted 20 years : During the reign of President José Sarney, the large landowners sabotaged the plans for agricultural reform with the help of armed militias. As a counter-movement, the landless organized themselves with the help of the Church Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT). In January 1985, the first national congress of delegates from the local CPT groups was held in Curitiba .

In 1997 a part of the MST founded the Homeless Workers Movement (MTST).

MST forms of action were and are land occupations of fallow land or land that is poorly managed, with the demand for expropriation by the state being repeatedly raised. In addition, lands of particular importance are occupied, such as the possession of President Cardoso in 1999, in order to attract attention. With the land occupations, the so-called acampamentos , landless families (250–500) are settled on the occupied land, who jointly manage the means of production within the framework of a production community and receive training in order to set up efficient production. The importance of collectivity towards the individual is always emphasized. These occupations are legal if, according to the expertise of the state institute INCRA (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária), the occupied land has not been processed beforehand.

The MST organizes large rallies (such as a star march on Brasília in 1997 with 40,000 participants), hunger marches or blood donation campaigns. In 1996/1997 the MST received the King Baudouin Prize .

The Eldorado dos Carajás massacre, sketched by Carlos Latuff

The movement suffered bloody repression from the military, the government and private militias. On April 17, 1996, a massacre was committed in Eldorado dos Carajás , in which 19 MST activists were killed. A pillar of shame is a reminder. The MST nonetheless received further and additional support. By the end of the 1990s, the MST had won land for around 350,000 families - from an estimated 4.5 million landless families.

Under the government of Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva , to whose party Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party) some members of the MST belong, hopes for a real land reform were higher than ever, as Lula had begun with the promise of carrying out one . At the beginning of Lula's term of office, a "plan to implement the agricultural reform" was passed, which included resettling 540,000 families and regulating previously unregulated property rights of smallholders, but the MST accuses the government of only combining this plan To have implemented third and not to have extended it after it expired in 2007. After the MST decided to limit actions and occupations to large private estates between 2002 and 2005, it returned to political action in 2005. This included a march of around 13,000 landless people from Goiânia to the capital Brasília, followed by a large demonstration there. The MST accused the PT government of having only achieved social reform improvements in individual cases instead of a thorough change in the relations of production .

In the mid- 2000s , the MST was active in 23 of the 26 Brazilian states and looked after around 1.5 million landless people.

criticism

Although the MST had achieved fully legal status under Lula's government, attacks by the bourgeois press on the movement continued. In 2005 the Veja magazine accused the MST of having had telephone contact with the illegal prisoners' movement PCC , which the MST denied, and compared the MST schools, where children are taught by small farmers, with Islamic madrasas .

In September 2006, a commission dominated by landowner-friendly congressmen argued that the MST's actions were "terrorist" and that deaths would also be accepted. However, these claims have never been substantiated and there is no known case in which the MST has caused human death.

See also

literature

  • Sandra Lassak: “We need land to live!” Resistance from women in Brazil and feminist liberation theology . Matthias Grünewald Verlag, Ostfildern 2011. ISBN 978-3-7867-2873-3 . (therein pp. 156–193 on the history of the MST)
  • Günther Schulz: Land occupation - hope for millions . Lusophonie-Verlag Portuguese-speaking countries, Eichstätten 1995. ISBN 3-931379-00-0 .
  • Roland Spliesgart: Agricultural collectives as an alternative? A case study in land reform settlements in Brazil . LIT, Münster 1995.

Web links

Commons : MST  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Movimento dos Sem Terra . In: Workbook for the World Day of Prayer 1988, pp. 75–77, here p. 75.
  2. ^ Friends of the MST Agricultural reform as social policy
  3. Terra magazine, May 16, 2006: MST descarta ligação com PCC
  4. ^ Veja, September 8, 2004: Madraçais do MST
  5. ^ Rafael Litvin Villas Bôas: Terrorismo à brasileira: a retórica da vez da classe dominante contra o MST . In: Revista Nera , ISSN  1806-6755 , Vol. 11 (2008), No. 13, pp. 156–165, here p. 159 ( online ) (PDF file; 172 kB), accessed on April 16, 2020.