Landless Workers' Movement - Foundation

Foundation

The smashing of the peasant leagues in the wake of the 1964 coup opened the way for a process of commercialization of agriculture and ensuing landed property concentration that proceeded unabated throughout the military dictatorship and expressed itself in an absolute decline of the rural population during the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, out of a grand total of 370 million hectares of farm land, 285 million hectares (77%) were held by latifundia. The redemocratization process during the 1980s, however, allowed for grassroots movements to pursue their own interests as against the state and the ruling classes, and it is into this framework that the emergence of the MST fits.

Beginning in December 1980 and early 1981, over 6,000 landless families established an encampment on a portion of land located between three unproductive estates in Brazil's southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul. These families which included part of 600 families that had previously been expropriated and dislocated in 1974 from neighbouring Passo Real for the construction of a hydroelectric dam who had been joined by some other 300 families in an invasion of the Indian Reserve in Nonoai. Local mobilization of the Passo Real and Nonoai people had already achieved some land distribution outside the reservation, followed by demobilization. It was those who had not received land from these claims, joined by others, and led by the same leaders from the already existing reginal movement MASTER (Rio Grande do Sul landless farmers' movement), who eventually came to compose the 1980/1981 encampment. 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 forces led by an officer notorious for his past experience in counter-insurgency, refused the alternative of being resettled on the Amazonian frontier, and eventually pressured the Military Government into expropriating nearby lands for the purposes of agrarian reform. Most of the early development of the MST concerned exactly 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 as a response to the growing difficulties posed by agribusiness to the reproduction of family farming. By the same token, the MST developed at the time what was to be its chief modus operandi: its organizing around local, concrete stuggles of a specific demographic group.

The MST was officially founded in January 1984, during a National Encounter of landless workers in Cascavel, Paraná, as Brazil's Military dictatorship came to a close. The founding process itself was very much connected with Catholic Church base organizations such as Pastoral Land Commission, which provided support and infrastructure. During much of the 1980s, the MST faced political competition from the National Confederacy of Agrarian Workers' (CONTAG), heir to the 1960s Peasant Leagues, who sought to address the issue of land reform strictly by legal means, by favoring tradeunionism and striving after corporatist concessions to rural workers. However, the more aggressive tactics of the MST allowed it to gather a capital of political legitimacy that soon outshone CONTAG, who was allowed to linger a shadowy existence as a mere rural branch to the trade union central CUT, while MST monopolized political attention as overall rural workers' representative. From the 1980s until today, the MST hasn't enjoyed 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, it is the MST who is by far the most organized group dealing in occupations, enjoying political leverage enough to turn occupation into formal expropriation for public purposes: already in 1995, out of 198 occupations carried out, 89 (45%) were organized by the MST, but these included 20,500 (65%) out of the grand total of 31,400 families involved.