Human Rights in Brazil - Agrarian Violence and Oppression

Agrarian Violence and Oppression

The agrarian struggle in Brazil is manifold, touching on the topics of deforestation, dam building, eviction, squatting, and wildlife smuggling. The enormous Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil involves large and migrating landless populations. Landowners resort policemen to drive and intimidate landless populations from their properties.

Other cases of agrarian human rights violations involve invasion of properties and taking landowners as hostages, in order to force the government to provide land for the Landless Worker's Movement. Further agrarian violence arises from smugglers of exotic animals, wood, and other minerals from extracting contraband from forest or agrarian areas. Brazil's Landless Workers Movement, or in Portuguese Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), is the largest social movement in Latin America with an estimated 1.5 million members organized in 23 out 27 states. The MST carries out long-overdue land reform.

Since 1985, the MST has invaded lands where they have established collective farms, schools for their children and adults and clinics, and natural agriculture. The MST got land titles for more than 350,000 families in 2,000 settlements as a result of MST actions, and 180,000 encamped families currently await government entitlement. Land occupations are not rooted in the Brazilian Constitution, because they violate the property rights - unless the government determines there is another social function that fits better to the property. The MST's success lies in its financial support from the Worker's Party (Brazil) and other left-leaning organizations from Brazil and abroad, despite of the fact most of population doesn't agree with its modus operandi. Members have not only managed to get land for their families, but also continue to develop a family agriculture model as an alternative to today's agrobusiness that makes up one third of Brazil's GDP.