[News] For Forty Years, Brazil’s Landless Workers Have Fought to Build Humanity
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Thu Apr 18 10:47:23 EDT 2024
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*For Forty Years, Brazil’s Landless Workers Have Fought to Build
Humanity: The Sixteenth Newsletter (2024)*
Artwork by Vienno.
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Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
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Brazilian landless workers, who live on settlements and encampments of
the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), gathered roughly 13 tonnes of food
to send to Palestinians in Gaza between October and December 2023. MST
cooperatives across the country participated in the solidarity campaign,
which included milk from Cooperoeste in Santa Catarina, rice from Terra
Livre Cooperative, the Cooperative of Settled Workers of the Porto
Alegre Region (Cootap), and Cooperav in Rio Grande do Sul, and corn
flour from Terra Conquistada in Ceará. The aid was sent to the
Palestinian Agricultural Workers’ Union through the Brazilian Air Force.
‘The Palestinian people, like all the peoples fighting for their
sovereignty, need the solidarity actions of other peoples’, said
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Jane Cabral of the MST national leadership. Indeed, the world must
follow the example of Brazil’s landless workers.
Collecting food has only been one aspect of the MST’s solidarity action
with the Palestinian people. The other equally important aspect has been
about building a consensus in Brazil regarding Israel’s genocide in
Gaza. Over the past several decades, the right-wing evangelical movement
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in Latin America has promoted a pro-Israeli political agenda in Brazil
and elsewhere. This movement defends Israel in the hope that it will
destroy the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and build the ‘Third Temple’
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Under this view, the temple will open the door to the return of Christ,
and all non-Christians, including Jews, will be subjected to eternal
damnation. Evangelical pastors in Latin America – many of them funded by
US-based Christian Zionist groups such as Christians United for Israel –
have spread this deeply hateful, anti-human view. This is an important
reason why right-wing leaders in the region, including former Brazilian
President Jair Bolsonaro and current Argentinian President Javier Milei,
are staunch defenders of Israel and the Zionist project. As such, the
MST’s mass drive to collect food for Gaza was also a campaign to contest
the growth of Christian Zionism in Brazil, advocate for the rights of
the Palestinian people, and deepen education about and ties with the
Palestinian struggle amongst its base.
Artwork by Judy Duarte
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The MST, with its nearly two million members, is the largest
socio-political movement in Latin America and one of the largest peasant
movements in the world. Since it was born forty years ago, in 1984, the
MST has grown steadily because of its unique approach to building and
maintaining its base among landless workers. Our latest dossier, /The
Political Organisation of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)/
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examines the theoretical orientation that has enabled the MST to build
this remarkable organisation on the terrain of Brazil’s wretched social
hierarchies, which are rooted in the legacy of Portuguese colonialism,
genocide, slavery, and US-backed military dictatorships. The art for the
dossier, which is also featured in this newsletter, was created for the
‘Forty Years of the MST
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call for art organised by the MST, Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research, ALBA Movements, and the International Peoples’ Assembly. The
second monthly bulletin from Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research’s art department will focus on that exhibition; you can
subscribe to it here
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The MST has three goals: to fight for land, to fight for agrarian
reform, and to transform society. Based on Brazil’s 1988 Constitution,
the MST organises landless workers to seize unproductive land and build
settlements (/assentamentos/) and squatters’ encampments
(/acampamentos/). At present, nearly half a million families live on
such settlements and have gained legal tenure of the land, where they
have built 1,900 peasant associations, 185 cooperatives, and 120
MST-owned agro-industrial sites, with an additional 65,000 families
living on encampments and fighting for legal recognition. It is these
institutions that produce the goods sent to Palestine. Despite the
unequal balance of forces in Brazil, where the capitalist class enforces
its rule over the economy and the countryside through domination of the
state, the MST has been able to build its strength over the years and
currently operates in twenty-four of the country’s twenty-six states.
This strength is a product of the MST’s mass base and its organisational
methods. As the dossier explains, a crucial aspect of the MST’s
organisational theory is the idea that the /assentados/, the residents
of the agrarian reform settlements, must always be /in motion/. There
are seven organisational principles that allow the MST to drive this
motion: its /autonomy /in relation to political parties, churches,
governments, and other institutions, for which organisational /unity /is
essential; the training of organisers both to /participate/ in building
the organisation and to be /disciplined/ with respect to the decisions
of the /collective leadership/; the importance of /study/; and the
necessity of /internationalism/.
The MST does not only fight for land; it also seeks to enact agrarian
reform and transform society. In other words, it seeks to change the
very nature of agrarian capitalism and construct a model of agroecology
that develops a balanced and sustainable form of agriculture – one that
harnesses nature rather than degrades it and produces healthy food for
society at large.
Artwork by Duda Oliva.
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There are now over 2.4 billion people in the world who are food insecure
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More and more famines are breaking out, from Sudan to Palestine, often
related to conflicts of different kinds. Meanwhile, we are in the midst
of the United Nations Decade of Family Farming, which began in 2019 and
will close in 2028. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO)
calculates that family or small farmers produce
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a third of the world’s food and up to 80%
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of the food in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Yet these small and family
farmers do not control the land that they till, nor do they have the
capital to increase their productivity. As a consequence, many small
farmers produce food for the market but not enough to feed their
families, leading to an epidemic of hunger amongst millions of small
farmers and peasants.
As the FAO notes
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‘The majority of the 600 million farms in the world are small. Farms of
less than one hectare account for 70% of all farms but operate only 7%
of all agricultural land’. This great inequality in land ownership is at
the heart of the work of the MST, as well as organisations around the
world such as Mviwata
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in Tanzania (about whom we will be publishing a dossier later this year)
and the All India Kisan Sabha
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in India (whom we wrote about in our June 2021 dossier, /The Farmers’
Revolt in India/
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It is for good reason that the 16 million-member Kisan Sabha, for
instance, joined
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the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against apartheid
Israel in 2017 and why Mviwata, which represents 300,000 peasants,
condemned
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Israel’s genocide of Palestinians at its annual meeting in December
2023. These farmers and peasants know that their task is not only to
redistribute land, but to transform society across the world.
Artwork by Natália Gregorini
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In 1968, Thiago de Mello (1926–2022), born in Brazil’s Amazonas, was
sent into exile for his criticism of the military dictatorship. He went
to Chile, where he befriended Pablo Neruda. Before long, de Mello was
again forced to flee a military dictatorship, chased out of Chile
because of the 1973 coup
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against the socialist project led by then President Salvador Allende. De
Mello first went to Argentina and then to Europe. It was during this
flight, in 1975, that he wrote his classic poem /Para os que virão/
(‘For Those to Come’), the last few lines about the hurt that must be
overcome by people who come to fight for social transformation:
It doesn’t matter if it hurts: it’s time
to move forward hand in hand
with those walking in the same direction,
even if it’s a long way off
from learning how to conjugate
the verb to love.
Above all, it’s time
to stop being just
the solitary vanguard
of ourselves.
It’s about meeting.
(The clear truth of our mistakes burns limpid and hard in our chests)
It’s about opening the way.
Those who will come will be the people,
and they will know themselves by fighting.
Happy fortieth birthday to the MST! Don’t forget to read our dossier,
here, recommended by one of the movement’s founders, João Pedro Stedile:
‘I recommend the newest dossier from Tricontinental: Institute for
Social Research about the MST’s organising experience, launched during
this International Week of Peasant Struggle’.
Warmly,
Vijay
Website <www.eltricontinental.org>
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