The MST, Brazil and the struggle for land

The Landless Workers Movement (MST) organises thousands of Brazil’s rural poor. João Pedro Stedile, from the MST executive, spoke to Luke Stobart

Socialist Worker online

June 10, 2006

Luke Stobart: Recent years have seen an explosion of struggles in Latin America. Alongside workers and the urban poor, rural movements have played a key role. Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST) is the largest and most successful of these, organising a series of dramatic land occupations. What has the MST achieved through these struggles?

João Pedro Stedile: The MST’s most important achievement has been to organise the poor in the countryside. In Brazil there are five million landless workers, the poorest layer of rural society.

We have won land for 500,000 families, some three million people. These families are still fighting on other fronts – for food sovereignty [control over the way food is produced and sold], education and to change the existing agricultural model.

There are also 150,000 families currently occupying land or camped out on roadsides. They are in permanent conflict with the big landowners or the government.

Brazil’s elite accept that people organise to beg or to get votes for them. What they fear is the poor acting on their own ideas. If the landless do not organise themselves, nobody is going to resolve their problems, not even a left wing government...

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